


Second Chance Lives

by raeldaza



Category: Marvel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Friends to Lovers, Iron Man 2 AU, M/M, Slow Burn, and working through your feelings, there's a cat named Roomba
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-05-20 01:15:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 43,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14884842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raeldaza/pseuds/raeldaza
Summary: Tony's gonna die of palladium poisoning anyway, why not join a pointless expedition to recover Captain America’s body? And after, well, why not dedicate his last few months to making sure an American hero settles into his new life? What else is he going to do, get drunk at parties?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Times lines and canon fucked with a bit, and expects at least some knowledge of IM2.

Tony is fairly certain he has given more thought to how and when he was going to die than most people.

When he was young, and we’re talking still sitting on laps and listening to stories of superheroes with wide and trusting eyes type young, he thought his dad would figure out the Captain America serum and give it to him, and he’d live forever. After he turned five and built his first robot, he thought he would be the one to do it.

A psychologist might say that’s when his egoism starts, but he digresses.

When he hits boarding school, it occurs to him he might not want to live forever. His father’s cold, calculating disappointment, his inability to relate to any of his peers, his long, empty days spent playing alone in big, sterile conference rooms – if that was a vision into the future, the cold reality of life, then he wasn’t particularly interested.

If a psychologist ever heard that one, and what age he first thought it, they might be shocked into silence. But he hasn’t seen one, so he doesn’t know.

When MIT rolls around, he decides it’s far more fun to flirt with death than scare it off. He sets fire to his insides for fun, and every morning that he wakes up with a black-out memory or feeling like he’s rotting, his own funeral flashes across his eyes.

It’s not an unwelcome sight to his corrupted mind – that is, until he got a phone call that he better start planning his parents’ one.

He stands over their graves, his mind blank, body cold, eyes damp, with Obadiah’s arm around his shoulders, the canyon to jump of taking over the company looming, and he decides something else – it was time to start chasing the future instead of the end.

Those years in his late twenties to early thirties were some of his best in regards to his own self-worth, even though now they make him look back and cringe with a dark, hollow feeling – but then, he didn’t care. He liked who he was, he liked what he was doing, he felt good doing it, and he wanted to live as long as possible so he could keep doing it.

And then age 38 rolled around. The year he accepted that he was going to die and probably deserved to die, but was going to keep walking, even with a broken chest, even with a self-loathing he hadn’t felt for decades, fixing what he could until he was brought down.

Afghanistan was like being on a plane that was gonna crash.

Iron Man is like grabbing the plane’s handles and pointing it towards the ground at an enemy base.

Either way you’re gonna die, but with control, it’s a choice.

And here he is, all the way to year 39, staring down at JARVIS’s report on his blood toxicity levels, and he feels a twitch of helplessness once again.

“JARVIS, buddy, how many more combinations do we have on the list to try to replace the core?” he asks, tapping the reactor, and fully knowing the answer.

“None, sir.”

Tony doesn’t remember when he programmed the sympathetic lilt into JARVIS. Could have been accidentally, could have been absentmindedly, could have been his learning program watched a couple too many therapy videos on YouTube – but regardless, he finds he appreciates it in a way he will never say out loud.

“Okay, then. Open new project file.”

“On Stark Industries server, sir?”

“Nah, keep it on the personal one for now.”

“And what would you like to name it?”

Tony’s spins around in his chair to face his computer – and fuck, his knee hit his desk, who decided he needed steel tables in a workshop anyway – and looks at the screen, where a cursor is blinking at him.

His pinky twitches and, horrifyingly, he feels a heat behind his eyes.

As someone who made a life out of running from his personal problems, he wasn’t expecting the somber, weighted feeling that comes from facing them.

“Oh, I don’t know, JARVIS,” he says. He clenches his hand into a fist, and it doesn’t shake anymore. “Just call it ‘The Inevitable.’”

* * *

When his personal line rings, the list is getting damn long.

He was vaguely aware that there are a lot of ducks to get into rows when people died, and that’s for _normal_ people. Not a person who owns more property than some small countries, who has billions of dollars to decide where goes, more than 80,000 employees to secure the fate of, entire departments that depend on his mind for products that are going to need years of material until he can be (somewhat) replaced – and the list goes on, down to number 104, or so far.

He supposes he should be glad he doesn’t have more friends or family. One less thing to deal with.

The first five items are the most important:

  1. What will happen to the Iron Man armor?
  2. What will happen to JARVIS and the bots?
  3. What to leave Pepper?
  4. What to leave Rhodey?
  5. How can he ensure all SI weapons are gone for good?



Other items, like who to make CEO and where all his shit will go, are easier. He’s considering ranking them by difficulty level so he can actually get started on some of the less daunting aspects, when his phone goes off. 

He stares at it for a second.

In retrospect, Tony isn’t sure why he takes the call.

Another him, most hims actually, would ignore it.

He doesn’t answer many of his calls; he has far too many calls a day for that to be an option and he really doesn’t understand why people just don’t communicate purely technologically, come on, what century is it, but anyway – he doesn’t answer many calls, but he almost never answers SHIELD in particular. Mostly because he programmed hold music for that particular number and truly enjoys the thought of Fury sitting at his desk, angrily staring at the phone, cyclops eye twitching as “You’re So Vain” plays on a continuous loop.

But also somewhat because Afghanistan has made him instantly wary of any governmental contracts, especially ones that come from people who aren’t willing to tell you what your tech or consultation is going to be used for.

The reasons probably balance to 50/50.

But he’s most of the way through his whiskey, his list is up on his computer screen, and there’s an invite to a Stark Expo in a few months that has been on his desk all day, and he’s had to ask himself the honest question if he’s going to be alive to see it in order to reply positively, and everyone has their threshold for how many harsh realities they can face in a day, and Tony doesn’t want to even come close to touching his limit.

So he accepts the call.

“Brooklyn’s Cheese Emporium, James speaking. We gouda extra mile to make your day grate.”

“Mr. Stark.” Ah, Agent Coulson, then. Tony puts his feet up on his desk and presses the whiskey to his head, closing his eyes. The cool glass actually feels nice. “Good to hear you.”

“Of course it is. And may I say, it’s lovely to hear your dulcet tones. What do you want from me this time?”

“Actually, we don’t want anything.” Tony’s eyes open in surprise involuntarily.

“Doth my ears deceive me?”

“This is a formality call. One of the expeditions your dad’s legacy account funds is leaving tomorrow. We normally send the invitation for you to through the mail,” God, he probably means snail mail, why is the government stuck in the 1800s in so many ways, “but as this is the first one to be using your own sonar technology, and I will be joining for the first time, I thought I may as well give you the courtesy call personally.”

“Expedition?” Tony repeats. “What are you talking about, dad’s expeditions?”

“You may not remember, being seventeen, but in your father’s will, he left a considerable amount of money for yearly expeditions to try to recover Captain America’s body.”

“Good God,” Tony mutters. “That kind of money could have fed 40 families for 40 years, and he spent it on a dead guy’s body being allowed to decay.”

“You don’t have to come.”

Tony pauses. His cursor is blinking next to number 104: “Where to donate my workshop tech? MIT? Spread out to different colleges? Poor colleges? Small companies? Upcoming scientists? MUST PUT CLAUSE IN MY WILL OR THEY WILL SELL IT WHEREVER AND IT MAY END UP SOMEWHERE LIKE HAMMER’S LAB”

“You know what?” His feet clatter to the floor. “Sign me up.”

* * *

“North Atlantic Ocean.” Tony feels absolutely ridiculous in his puffy orange parka. And it takes a lot to make him feel any type of shame, but this actually manages. “You didn’t _mention_ that this boat was going to the _North Atlantic Ocean,_ Agent.”

Coulson raises an eyebrow at him. “I figured you’d know. Where else would we look for Captain America?”

Tony’s annoyed by how even Coulson’s tone is, he’s annoyed by how he’s the only one who’s shivering, and he’s supremely annoyed that Coulson is absolutely right, he definitely should have known.

He wouldn’t call his past self exactly a Captain America fanboy. But that’s mostly because he dislikes the term fanboy, because the term is too corny to properly capture his innocent enthusiastic hero-worship of what he _thought_ was a mostly-fictionalized super character. He was a boy with a brain too big and a heart already wounded, of course he would chase a dream of being an important, big person who punches his problems away.

Most boys dream of being super. Tony actually thought he was capable of it. It’s no _surprise_ that he liked him.

Okay, so he may be slightly embarrassed of his past self’s fanboy qualities. At least he doesn’t currently have any of the merchandise.

Beyond what his dad kept, of course.

“Why are you even in a suit?” Tony grumbles, waving a hand at Coulson’s perfectly pressed grey-pinstripe number. “We’re on a boat in the middle of the ocean, there’s no dress code to adhere to.”

Coulson looks decidedly unimpressed. “ _You’re_ in a suit, Tony.”

“Yeah, because it makes me look dashing and handsome and rich. Yours was probably bought at what, a Men’s Wearhouse?”

“Men’s Wearhouse is a perfectly fine place to buy a suit for us not-billionaire people.”

“A tragedy. You’re honestly a tragedy. Shakespeare quality. Someone is going to grab your skull and monologue sadly at it, one day.”

Coulson is too good to look fully annoyed, but there’s definitely some type of gleam in his eye. “You didn’t have to come. I seem to remember saying it was a courtesy call.”

“Hey, don’t go breaking my heart,” Tony says. Then, because he just _can’t_ not, “Don’t worry, you couldn’t even if you tried.”

Coulson rolls his eyes. A beat, then, “Miss Potts didn’t want to accompany you?”

“It’s not that,” Tony answers. “She just didn’t know I was leaving until I was already gone.”

“I’m sure she appreciated that.”

“There’s very little that she appreciates about me, let’s get that straight.”

Coulson looks a little pained, and opens his mouth to reply, but he’s interrupted by some young, male agent who says, “Mr. Coulson” with a British accent, and Tony’s momentarily too distracted by why the British care about finding Captain _America_ that he totally misses what Coulson’s being whisked away for.

“Don’t get yourself into trouble while I’m gone, Tony,” Coulson says as he’s leaving.

“Why me, dear? I’d never.”

Thirty minutes later, emails answered, Pepper’s angry text replied to, three games of Tetris given up on, and he’s hacked into the ship’s sonar and changed their direction remotely.

Mostly because he’s bored, slightly because any idiot could calculate, given Cap’s last known coordinates, the plane’s weight, direction, speed, trajectory, and all those fun math details he can do without thinking, that they’re several miles off from the most likely place to find him. Their way will take several more outings, at least, if they even find him. At this pace, it’s more likely some Russian Oil Team will just stumble on it. That is, if there’s anything to even find.

Hey, if they didn’t want him hacking shit, they shouldn’t have used Stark Tech.

* * *

“Okay, that’s it, I’m calling it.”

The shield agent sitting across from Tony looks up, eyes wide, her hands stilling from where she was typing on some tablet.

“Sir,” she says, eyebrows drawing in. “Please, if you just gave us another hour or so, we’re—"

“No, not that,” he dismisses with a shake of his head. He stops for a second, cocking his head thoughtfully. “Though I appreciate that you know I have the authority to stop a 100+ manned governmental expedition just because my extremities are getting tingly. I’d give you a round of applause if I could feel my fingers.”

Her mouth is slightly open, like she knows she should respond, but doesn’t know what to say, so he plows helpfully ahead.

“No, I mean I am calling sitting here freezing my ass off when I don’t have to.”

“Do you mean you’re going down to your quarters?” she asks, which is a fair question, given they put around 7% effort into heating them, so they are marginally better than the dock, but that’s not at all what he meant.

“No, I got a little more dramatic of an upgrade in mind.”

He leans down under the seat that he claimed as his from the moment he walked on and pulls out a briefcase. He pulls it up between him and the woman – what is her name, anyway? Judy? This is why he needs JARVIS in his glasses as well as the HUD – and opens it, carefully hiding its contents from her until it’s deploying.

The Iron Man suit looks cool when going on, sue him for wanting to show off a little bit.

The last of it clicks into place. “Welcome, sir,” JARVIS greets, and Tony instantly smiles.

“Hey bud. Activate heater.”

It immediately heats, and his fingers and toes start to tingle as they regain feeling.

He turns to the woman, who gratifyingly looks as impressed as he imagined, and he’s trying to think of a good one liner for her – most of his default ones require winking, which just Does Not Work in the armor – when an alarm blasts.

They both jump.

“Mr. Coulson,” the woman barks into her walkie talkie. A real walkie talkie, Jesus. “What’s happening?”

Despite the purpose of the trip, the next words from Coulson were some of the last Tony had expected.

“We found it.”

* * *

“Stark, what are you doing in the armor?”

Tony ignores the question because it’s stupid, and instead asks, “How do you know this is it?” He, a parka-clad Coulson, and two other agents are standing in-front of a massive plane, halfway rooted into the Earth. “Couldn’t this be anything?”

“No,” Coulson replies, almost shouting above the wind. “Look at the serial number on the side.”

Tony can’t look at him banefully through the suit, but he gives it a full A+ effort anyway. “Do I _look_ like the sort of person who memorizes serial numbers to planes of dead WWII veterans?”

“It’s Captain America’s,” Coulson confirms. “I’m sure.”

“Want me to break in? Take a looksie down there?”

“No, we’re getting some equipment—”

“Look,” Tony says, turning his hands around, repulsors starting to light. “I got all the equipment you need, right here. I’ll blast a hole inside, jump down. It might be dangerous and this suit will protect me better than anything your agents got lying around. Not to mention I can just fly myself and whatever I find down there out, instead of whatever convoluted master plan you have cooking.”

“This isn’t really why we brought you—”

“Brought me?” Tony interrupts. “Excuse you, I came. You didn’t bring me anywhere. And look, I can just—” He aims a repulsor at the topside of the plane and shoots, the bright blue light cutting through the metal like butter. Coulson squeaks slightly, and Tony wonders how he can hear it above the snow and wind, but when he looks back, Coulson only looks mildly sickened. “Way faster, right?”

“That’s a historical artifact,” Coulson protests weakly. “You just blasted a hole into—”

Tony’s done wasting time on this conversation like, pronto. The cold makes the metal casing of the reactor act up with the flesh surrounding it no matter how well integrated it is into the armor. Plus, he’s starting to feel slightly on the wrong side of normal, which has been happening more and more as the poisoning starts taking effect.

“Bye guys,” he says, and flies through the hole.

Inside the plane is mostly just snow and ice covered. The armor’s feet crunch the snow, leaving wide footprints, and he does consider that he maybe should have asked what exactly it was he was looking for.

It’s not as dark as he thought it might be, as the hole he made provided okay lighting. The reactor helps slightly, but it’s still dim enough that he asks JARVIS to lighten up the screen of the HUD.

“Sir,” JARVIS starts.

“Yeah, that’s better, I can see fine.”

“No, sir,” JARVIS continues, which makes Tony stop mid-stride, foot not coming back down. “I am detecting a heartbeat.”

“What?” Tony asks, astonished. “Aside from me and the agents up there?”

“Yes, sir. In the room to your right.”

“A heartbeat,” Tony repeats. “Not a body, but a heartbeat.”

“It’s slow, sir.”

The numbers flash inside his HUD, and no shit it’s slow. It’s not-really-alive type slow. A I’ve-been-put-in-a-medically-induced-coma-and-I’m-not-coming-back-out slow.

There’s other stats too. A slightly warmer area than the rest of the snow, about in the shape of a human body. A very, very slight biomagnetism reading consistent with the human body that he can only tell exists because he got bored five weeks ago and put a superconducting quantum interference device into the suit.

“Did somebody else get in here?” he wonders aloud. “Some poor sod who got lost and was looking for shelter?”

“I do not know, sir,” JARVIS answers unhelpfully.

Tony’s heading towards the reading when he steps on something that almost makes him slip. He stumbles, catches his balance, and looks down.

His foot pushed away the snow – and red, white and blue and the peak of a star is poking out.

“No _way._ ”

He leans down and pries the shield out of the ice, glad for the suit’s superhuman strength, because there’s no way he could have brute-forced that thing out any other way.

It’s light, incredibly light, and Tony is once again hit with a surge of longing for vibranium – if only he could make the _suit–_

He shakes his head, forcing himself to stay on task. He throws the shield up a little, once, twice, catching it. It’s sturdy and solid and just as bright as it always looked in the comics and posters. He’s impressed that the paint job has managed to stay despite being in the elements for 70 years. Maybe he can test–

“Sir,” JARVIS interrupts his internal monologue. “I do find myself curious about the heartbeat in the next room.”

“If it’s a live person, they won’t be for long,” Tony says, but dutifully lets the shield drop to his side and continues on.

The door takes a bit of doing to open. It broke in several places during the crash, and then froze in the odd shapes. Eventually, he just takes the repulsors to the hinges and hopes he hasn’t hit anything on the inside when they make it through.

The door clatters down into the snow, making a bang against the steel floors.

Tony takes a second to look around, but it only takes a moment for him to notice there’s a body near the controls.

It takes a second more to notice what the body is wearing.

“Oh my God,” he says the JARVIS. “That’s where the heartbeat is coming from?”

“It would seem so,” JARVIS answers.

“Well,” Tony says, stuck slightly stunned in the doorway. “That’s unexpected.”

* * *

Look, Tony has had a lot of tough challenges – making the reactor in a cave with a box of scraps comes to mind – but he’s man enough to admit that getting Captain America’s body out of there unscathed is an absolute bitch.

“God damn it, JARVIS, there has to be a way to use the repulsors to melt the ice without actually burning him.”

“I’ve run the math sir,” and great, now JARVIS sound sniffy with him. “There is no way without compromising the structural integrity of the floor and ice sheet below us.”

“God damn it,” he says, and continues hacking at the ice with the thankfully decent sized knife he put in the armor.

When the body finally comes loose enough to wiggle, Tony grabs and pulls, hard.

It’s not graceful and probably not a good move in the long run, but he desperately wants to get out of there before they send a team after him. It’s so much more triumphant to come up holding a body than to have a team of agents come up behind him while he’s hitting ice with a knife like some Norwegian ice-fisherman.

It does come loose, in the end. He needs both hands to carry him, which means needing some creativity to also carry the shield. He balances it against the Captain’s torso, though it’s slippery with the ice, and he silently apologies for treat him like a desk.

He walks to the hole he blasted – and God, this dude is heavy, even in the armor.

“Hey,” he shouts, making sure to amplify the armor’s speakers. “You still up there?”

A moment, then, “Stark? Is that you?”

“Yep. Take a few steps away from the hole, okay?”

“Okay,” he hears. He’s not sure who’s shouting. “Glad to hear you. Thought we might need to send a search party.”

“I’m not the one who needed one,” he shouts back. “Stand back.”

He takes the shield, reaches back, and chucks it up. It makes it through, and he’s a little proud of his skills; he was never all that good at frisbee in college, but he can hear the thump as it lands up on the snow.

With a blast of his repuslors, he heads up and out.

He may die within a year, but he’s fairly certain even if he did make it to 100, nothing would quite beat the look on Coulson’s face at seeing him holding Captain America’s perfectly preserved, and possible alive, body.

* * *

“He is alive,” Coulson confirms.

“Jesus,” Tony says.

He’s seated in front of the space heater he made out of spare parts in the middle of the night. He likes the armor, but not enough to sleep in it.

After he got the body back to the ship, he was quickly taken into the medbay and Tony was quickly ushered out. He’s a little offended – on the brink of a lot offended, come on, he was the one who _found_ him, how can it be classified – but he did appreciate the down time to warm up. He didn’t sleep well all night – for the first part, he is slowly dying, and sometimes, most times, he can actually feel it. As much as he doesn’t want to admit it, he’s not sure if it’s the physical or mental aspect of that that has him turning in his bed all night.

But more importantly, he was insatiably curious about what was going on with Captain America’s body.

There’s a thousand questions he can think of, and he’s not even an expert in biology. Different scenarios and possibilities ran through his head all night, and the image of the body lying there on the floor spins and spins and spins.

“Is he like—” Tony struggles for a second. “Fine? Brain-dead, brain-alive, functioning, moving, awake?”

“He’s not awake,” Coulson answers, shaking his head. “He’s in a medically induced coma. The nurse says she thinks there’s brain function. And now that he’s warmed—” Coulson shakes his head again. “In her expert opinion, she thinks he’ll be okay. It’s the strangest goddamn thing.”

“Awesome,” Tony says, and means it sincerely for the first time in perhaps ever. “I would love to know what was in that original serum.”

“As would thousands, like Banner and Hydra,” Coulson points out.

Tony flaps his hand. “Do you see me mixing chemicals, Agent? No. I’m just deeply fascinated by the science behind the somehow breathing Capsicle you got there. So, when are you going to wake him?”

“I was talking to Fury—” Oh, great, that means this conversation is definitely going to take a downward turn. “He wants to take him back to headquarters. He thinks it may scare him to wake him in the future, and he could become dangerous. It would be safer to wake him in a controlled environment made to look like the 40s, and slowly introduce him to the idea of the future.”

“That’s idiotic,” Tony finds himself blurting. “All that does is rise his hopes that he didn’t miss much. That his life and people will still be there when he gets out. Once you tell him, it’ll be a thousand times worse; you’re giving him hope and then taking it away. What do you think is more likely to make a man dangerous?”

“That’s a valid—”

“Plus, his first introduction to the future and SHIELD is going to be you lying to him. He’s gonna love that. Be real willing to work with you afterwards.”

Coulson looks at him, then bites his lip and looks down. He sighs, nice and heavy. “Look, Stark, you’re not necessarily wrong. And the last thing I want to do is hurt a treasured national icon—”

“Treasured?” Tony repeats. “Is it you with the childhood crush, not me?”

“But I can’t go against orders,” Coulson finishes.

“Hm,” Tony says, and brings his fingers to his chin, stroking it like a James Bond villain. Actually, he would make a _great_ James Bond villain – why did he never look into acting? “What if stole your phone and told the nurse to wake him up?”

“That would be highly illegal,” Coulson says mildly. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone. Tony watches as he bends down, places his phone by his foot, and then ties an already tied shoe. He stands, phone still on the ground.

Tony swipes it before Coulson can change his mind. He hits the home button – a Stark phone, thank God – when the keypad comes up.

“041983 is such a nice number,” Coulson says to the wall.

Tony grins.

* * *

It takes a few days, but Tony’s leaning against a wall inside a medical room, bare except for the necessities, with Coulson sitting in a chair at the bed, both of them staring at a slowly breathing Steve Rogers.

It wasn’t easy to convince Coulson that he should be in the room. Coulson made a probably valid point about how Tony might be a _little_ bit brash, and this conversation is probably going to take extreme diplomacy and decorum to explain properly. Tony made an equally valid counter point that his family funded the expedition and he was the one to return the body and _he_ was the one who made it possible for _Coulson_ to be there when he awakes because of the little phone stunt, so Coulson can wisely shove it and let him be in there so Tony doesn’t have to force his way in with the Iron Man suit.

Coulson had stared at him a little disrespectfully for that one, so Tony made the better point that it might be useful to have him and the suit in there in case Cap woke up and got violent.

That one actually worked, and here they stand.

Tony isn’t sure why it’s so important to him to be in there.

There’s probably a lot of answers. He loved Cap when he was a kid, and it figures something residual is there. He’s extremely curious at what the reaction is going to be. This is something that has never happened before in the history of the world, and he gets to witness it. There’s nothing else to do on this stupid boat. He despises being excluded.

He’s dying, and this will possibly be the last interesting thing he’ll ever get to do.

It’s been almost an hour, though, and he’s considering getting inside the armor to watch some TV on the HUD, when Steve’s eyes blink open.

Both he and Coulson straighten unthinkingly.

It takes Steve a few seconds, but he sits up, slowly, which is actually really goddamn impressive for someone who’s been down that long.

“Easy, there, Captain,” Coulson says. His voice is soft and steady, and maybe he had a point when he told Tony to let him do all the talking and to shut his mouth unless necessary.

Steve’s eyes snap to Coulson. The flit down, then up, and then snap to Tony. Tony waves, short, once, and Steve looks back at Coulson.

“Where am I?” he says, and hello, deep voice.

“You’re on a ship in the Atlantic,” Coulson answers.

Steve looks around the room, taking everything in with rapid eye movements, quietly assessing, and Tony wonders what he’s realizing.

“Who are you? Both of you?”

“My name is Phil Coulson, and I work for a government agency. This is Tony Stark,” he stops abruptly, as if realizing he probably shouldn’t have said Stark, just in case, but then recovers quickly. “We found you in your crashed plane a few days ago. You’re in a medbay, being looked over until you awoke.”

Steve nods, barely, like he doesn’t realize he’s doing it. His eyes are still dancing across the room.

“How long have I been down?”

Tony suddenly feels a stab of compassion for Coulson. There is literally no way to say this in a way that’ll get believed. Or in a way that won’t hurt.

“Steve. Please stay calm, because I have some bad news to break for you.”

“Break what to me?”

“The ice,” Tony says. Coulson’s head snaps to him, horrified and disapproving, and Tony sniggers.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says, flipping his hand. “Just lightening the atmosphere.”

“Tony,” Coulson says, so disapproving, and Tony can see Steve’s eyes have latched onto him, now. He wonders what he thinks about the reactor, clearly glowing through his shirt.

“Break what to me, Mr. Coulson?” Steve repeats. He’s breathing nice and normal, and he doesn’t look panicked, but definitely tense, and Tony inches for the briefcase at his feet. He notices Steve’s eyes catch it, even though he doesn’t know Tony, so it shouldn’t mean anything to him.

“You’ve been in a coma in the ice for a very long time, Captain,” Coulson says, after a truly uncomfortable pause. Tony gives him his credit – there probably isn’t a better way to phrase it.

“A very long time?” Steve repeats. “How long is very long?”

A pause. When it doesn’t seem like Coulson knows how to say it, Tony pushes through, just like he always does, because drawing this out is just raising everyone’s blood pressures, and says, “Seventy years.”

Steve goes slightly still, but his eyes – God, his eyes, what is this, why is Tony so fixated on them – his eyes roam the room, as if trying to find something to confirm it. Or disprove it.

“Seventy years. It’s what, 2010?”

“Right on the money, Rogers, way to go,” Tony confirms. “Good addition skills.”

“Tony, what did I say about you talking?” Coulson says, pleasant but tight.

“Oh, sorry, you know quiet and I mix about as well as motor oil and water.” A second, then, “See what I did there? Motor oil, instead of oil, since I’m an—”

“Tony,” Coulson interrupts.

Tony mimes zipping his mouth shut.

They both turn back to Steve, who seems to be outright staring at only Tony now. Tony doesn’t blame him as he is obviously the most interesting thing in this room.

“2010.”

“Yes,” Coulson confirms. “February 2010.”

Steve noticeably swallows. “I guess I missed my date,” he says, trying for levity and missing it by a mile. “So everyone I know – they’re dead?”

“We don’t know that for sure—” Coulson starts, and really, didn’t Tony say already that giving him false hope would be worse in the long-run? Jesus Christ, no one listens to him.

“Yes, probably,” Tony interrupts. “All the commandos are gone, your whole neighborhood is now gentrified and for sure driven out any stragglers. Peggy Carter is still around, but her mind is going. I visit her about once a year, try to, she was around when I was a kid, but she doesn’t recognize me most times anymore. I can look up anyone else you care about, but yes, they’re probably all dead.”

“Tony,” Coulson says sharply. “Stop talking.”

“No, no,” Steve disagrees. His voice is definitely commanding – Tony would guess military if he heard that on the street. “Let him speak. I’d rather the truth.”

“See, Coulson?” Tony says smugly. “Unrepentant, blunt personalities do a have a purpose in life.”

“Not to – not to be rude, or anything,” Steve says, interrupting their staring contest. “But can one of you prove it?”

“Sure,” Tony agrees easily. He pushes himself off the wall and toes open the briefcase. With a button, the armor is assembling, and he can see Steve’s wide eyes through the assembly. Once it’s together, he says, “I could show you a calendar, but somehow, I think this might be a little more convincing.”

“What is that?” Steve asks. He leans forward, a hand coming up towards the armor. Tony steps forward, and lets Steve touch the arm.

“Armor, though that’s simplistic.”

“Like a weapon?”

Something in Tony’s stomach sours.

He pulls back and disassembles the armor, it folding back into the briefcase with ease. Once it’s off, he turns back to Steve, slightly stiffly. Steve’s wide, blue, innocent eyes smooths some of his hackles.

“Not as much,” Tony says, calmly. “More a peacekeeper.”

“They called weapons peacekeepers in my time, too,” Steve says.

Tony barks a laugh. “You went under before August ’45. You don’t know the half of it.”

“The war,” Steve says, blinking, like he’s surprised he forgot. “Did we win?”

“We did,” Coulson says, and something in Steve relaxes slightly.

“Though there’s been more wars,” Tony says. Coulson fixes him with a look again, which Tony finds insulting. “What? There has. Don’t want to give him false notions about the future. Yeah, Hitler’s dead, and yeah, the US hasn’t been out of war in like, a century.”

“That’s not surprising,” Steve says. He’s frowning. “If disappointing.”

“Oh ho ho, look who’s good at summing up US politics,” Tony says gleefully.

“Captain,” Coulson says, apparently trying to take up the reins again in this conversation. “I’d like to discuss with you what happens now.”

“I’d like to know too.” Steve runs a hand through his hair. Tony wonders idly why his hair stopped growing in the ice. Does the serum keep it at that nice, well-groomed length? Does ice interact oddly with keratin? “I suppose I don’t have anywhere to go back to. Or money.”

“Probably not, Captain. But you’re a national hero. SHIELD would be happy to put you up somewhere while we teach you about modern life.”

“SHIELD?” Steve asks.

“We’re a government agency.”

“Too classified for anyone to know what they’re an agency _for,_ though.” Tony’s getting sick of Coulson’s looks. “What? Like anyone could decode that stupid-ass acronym? You like being mysterious so no one looks into your shit.”

Coulson turns back to Steve, who is now looking at Tony, something evaluating in his gaze. Once Coulson starts talking again, it takes a moment for Steve to look back. “We’d give you anything you need.”

Tony is familiar with the feeling of helplessness and how it is often accompanied by the feeling of desperately needing to be useful. He knows himself well enough that both are about to come in spades in the following months.

His current plan for what to do with himself isn’t exactly going to win him a Nobel. He wants to finish his list – and then he was considering how often and fully he could get drunk to dull the pain of the poisoning as well as help him forget he’s dying.

Might party a bit, maybe some sex, definitely donuts, and hopefully a couple Iron Man missions as well. If he’s really lucky, a couple nights in with Pepper and Rhodey.

He realizes, in that moment, that he was getting ready to bow towards death.

Well, fuck that. It’s better to burn out than fade away. He might as well do something real, tangibly helpful. Isn’t that what his second chance is supposed to be about – not wasting his life? Making it mean something, to someone? Having a purpose beyond destruction, even of himself?

“Counter offer,” Tony says, stepping forward towards the bed. He puts a hand on Coulson’s shoulder, and God, Steve must be _tall_ , he barely has to bend down. “You could come live in my tower. Pluses: I’m a billionaire, I could give you anything you need. It’s in downtown New York, which you might like to see again. I am not a part of a shady government organization looking to use you for their own purposes. I’m just a curious dude with too much time on his hands who wouldn’t mind the company.” He mentally weighs his next point, and then just decides to go for it. “Plus, you knew my dad. Some connection to the past.”

“Your dad?” It takes Steve a second. “Stark? Like Howard? You’re Howard Stark’s son?”

“Amazingly enough, that’s not my greatest accomplishment, but yes. That’s me.”

Steve nods a little, assessing. “You sort of remind me of him.”

Something in Tony winces, and he hopes it doesn’t come out on his face. “Amazingly enough, that’s not really a compliment,” he says, trying to keep his tone light.

“Captain,” Coulson says. “Technically, you’re a private citizen and can do as you wish. You should know first, though, about what you’re getting into, and Mr. Stark’s reputation.”

“Rude,” Tony says.

“You certainly are selective about what you want to tell me, aren’t you, Mr. Coulson?” Steve says lightly, and Tony can feel something buoyant in his heart. That’s a dangerous tone. “I never really did like people who manipulate people on selective information. Whatever flaws Mr. Stark has, dishonesty doesn’t seem to be one.”

“Captain,” Coulson says, placating. “We would place you in a good room. We would have the best agents to teach you about the new world. We would train you to get back into the fight. There’s a lot we could offer.”

“At my place,” Tony buts in. “You can pick your room. And job. If you want a job. You can sit around on your ass all day, I don’t really give a shit.”

“That’s a waste of his talents—”

“Oh, I forgot, silly me, all someone is worth to you is their _talents_ —”

Steve raises a hand, effectively shutting them both up.

“Didn’t you say this was my choice?” Steve asks Coulson.

“Of course. In the end. I do have to voice my strenuous objection to Mr. Stark,” Coulson says, which deeply offends Tony. “He is no way capable of—”

“With all due respect, Mr. Coulson.” A pause. “And I’m not sure how much respect that actually is—” Tony snorts. “A house instead of a facility, and one person instead of groups of people, sounds better to me. Less stressful on everyone involved.”

“Captain—”

“I am going with Tony,” Steve says, voice firm. He raises an eyebrow. “Are you going to stop me?”

Tony has, perhaps, never felt so satisfied in his entire life. 

* * *

He waffles for a while about how to bring Steve back.

They’ve all already decided that it won’t be announced to the public, at least not now. He briefly considers taking him back to Malibu, but he promised to show him New York, and there’s something that kind of makes him twitch about that house now. Some may say it’s PTSD from being nearly murdered by his father figure and business partner and then indirectly causing the death of the same guy, but Tony thinks it’s more likely that it’s the new paint job. Pepper has terrible taste in wall colors.

The tower is fairly renovated and has more rooms than Tony cares to count. He has a quick and painful conversation with Pepper about moving DUM-E, YOU, and Butterfingers over to New York, and he starts to wonder how far this “not telling people” thing goes.

There’s no way Pepper’s not going to be in the tower, and there’s no way she’s going to miss the blonde haired, blue eyed guy built like a tree living in his guest room. It’s not like she’ll recognize him, but in a way, that makes it worse. If she knew who he was, she might understand why he feels the compulsion to keep him close, keep an eye on him.

As it stands, what’s he going to tell her? He needed a roommate for rent money? He’s a boyfriend that won’t go away? He’s a homeless dude Tony took pity on?

Nothing works.

Plus, Tony gets a feeling that Steve’s probably going to need friends, steady and kind friends, and there’s no better candidate for that than Pepper. It’d be nice for them to get along.

He figures Pepper’s a bridge he’ll cross when he gets there.

Which brings him back to getting there.

He simultaneously wants to show Steve everything and absolutely nothing. There’s so much _new_ and _grand_ about the world –  God, his reaction to Time’s Square and Vegas Tony is dying for, he truly is – but it’d be best to actually think through what order it should all come. It’s going to be confusing; there’s 70 years of puzzle pieces, and if he isn’t careful about what order he puts them together, the picture is just going to be more confusing than if he didn’t do anything at all.

He realizes, belatedly, this isn’t a small undertaking he just fought for.

But he’s made bigger decisions with less reasoning, and a hell of a lot less interesting results, so he figures it will work itself out.

So he decides to hide Steve away from everything, get him into the tower, and worry about it tomorrow. Or, probably more accurately, 3AM.

 _How_ is actually kind of a logistical problem.

The boat docks in New York, which is lucky, but it docks in Long Island. There really isn’t a way to get from Long Island to Manhattan without revealing just about all of New York City’s modern glamour and horrors.

He considers briefly flying Steve home with the armor, but quickly dismisses it. He’s never flown anyone before, and with his luck, he’d drop him. Steve Rogers: survives Nazis, scientific experimentation, and being frozen for 70 years, is killed by Tony Stark having a poor grip.

Nope, not an option.

In the end, he decides on a fairly small black limo with tinted windows.

They’re just about ready to dock the boat, and Tony realizes he doesn’t actually know where Steve is.

It takes him only a minute to find him in medbay, sitting on his bed, hunched over, like he’s trying to make himself smaller.

“Hey, Cap,” he says, rapping his knuckles on the door. Steve’s head raises, and he gives Tony a smile. “Ready to get introduced to the future?”

“Yeah.” Steve sets his shoulders back. “I’ve been preparing for it to look different. I’m ready.”

“Don’t set your expectations too high. The past made all sort of unreasonable expectations for us – flying cars, transporters, tin-foil outfits that make women’s breasts look pointy—”

Steve looks startled. “What?”

“We’ll get there in your pop culture education,” Tony says, flapping his hand. “Come on, follow me.”

Steve stands and follows him, and they head up the stairs. After Tony’s atop, he turns to look at Steve, watching his expression as he takes in the skyline.

Steve stops aside Tony, eyes sweeping side to side.

There isn’t actually that much to see here. Wooden dock, some ducks, a couple cars, a couple boats, water, the skyline. It’s definitely no downtown area. But still – there’s no way there’s not discrepancies. 

Unable to help himself, Tony bounces on the balls of his feet. “So? What do you think?”

Steve does a final look, then glances over at Tony. He gives him a small smile. “Looks similar, actually. At least from a distance.” He points at a black Chevy SUV parked in the lot, which Tony is fairly certain is for Coulson. “Cars look different.”

“They’re ugly now. And by that, I mean the basic cars that everyone has. There’s some great expensive ones, just wait and see my garage, it’s like a zoo for hundred thousand-dollar beauties, but the 1940s and earlier cars were just cooler in design. That’s gonna be a disappointment.”

“Hundred thousand-dollar cars?” Steve repeats, looking mildly horrified.

“Oh,” Tony says thoughtfully. “We also need to bring you up to speed on inflation.”

* * *

“You can poke it,” Tony says, amused.

Steve sits back, looking chastised. “Sorry. I won’t touch it.”

“What? No, that’s the exact opposite of what I said. You can poke it. I know you want to.”

Steve’s been carefully staring at all the interior parts to the car. It didn’t occur to Tony initially, but of course back then they only had roll down windows. Christ, _Tony’s_ first car didn’t have automatic windows.

Steve’s been looking but not touching, and it’s making Tony twitch. He’s a hands-on type guy. This kind of restraint is uncomfortable.

“Look,” Tony says, and leans over Steve. He systematically presses all the buttons. The window goes down. The window goes up. The door unlocks. The door relocks. The seat heater is turned on. The seat heater is turned off. “Play with them. You’re not going to hurt anything. And even if you do, I’ll just replace it.”

Steve looks doubtful, but he does reach forward and press the window button. The window goes down, dutifully. “Huh,” he says. “Convenient.”

“The word of America,” Tony agrees.

The next half hour is spent with Steve just staring out the window and Tony catching up on shit he let slide while on his impromptu vacation. He still is CEO; he’s gotta take care of _that_ soon. He doesn’t have time to email the board of directors back about the stock prices, like he even cares.

Tony feels a heavy weight of someone staring at him. He looks up and sees Steve, which is unsurprising, given they’re the only people in the back.

“Can I help you?”

“What are you poking at?” Steve asks, motioning to his phone.

“Ah.” Phones. Computers. Internet. This was all going to be so fun. And so impossible to describe. “It’s a phone.”

“A phone?” Steve repeats. He’s deadpan, but he doesn’t look confused. Just thoughtful. “I guess making them smaller and portable would be helpful.”

“It’s a lot more than just for calling now.”

Steve looks interested, but they’re basically at the tower, and Tony’s not fabulous at giving layman’s descriptions, so he just asks Happy to pull up in front of the sidewalk.

“We’ll get out in front,” he says. “Thanks Hap. You’re a peach. A true Georgia peach.”

“I’m from Minnesota,” Happy responds, frowning.

“Minnesota, Georgia, same difference.”

Tony opens the door and pulls Steve out behind him. 

They’re standing on the sidewalk, at the base of the tower. Happy pulls away, and they’re standing there, in downtown Manhattan.

“Well, what do you think? This is my Monticello, so tread lightly.”

Steve looks over at him. “It’s, uh. It’s big.”

God, there’s something about Steve’s face, his tone, that makes him just impossible to read. He could be aiming to kiss or shank Tony, and Tony would be none the wiser to either. It throws him off balance – it’s a lot harder to react to someone when they don’t show how they’re reacting to you.

Steve looks up to the top of the building, where STARK is hanging in massive letters. Tony bounces on his feet. “Don’t listen to any of those sayings about overcompensation. None of them are true.”

Steve just slightly nods his head, no real reaction, and Tony suddenly wonders how many of his jokes are going to make any sense to this guy. Hell if he knows when sayings came into popularity.

“I’m talking about my dick,” Tony explains helpfully.

“Yeah, I actually got that,” Steve replies.

“Alright then.” Tony claps his hands together, rubbing them in a Disney-villain like glee. “Let’s head in.”

They’re greeted by the security desk, but they’re virtually ignored by everyone else in the lobby. Granted, Tony shuffles them through like they’re avoiding the paparazzi and he just had a sex tape released, but still, he slightly wonders why he doesn’t warrant more hellos. They make it up to the penthouse fairly quickly, and Tony gives him the dollar tour, just enough for him to get around.

“So,” he asks, elbows leaning on the back of the couch where Steve is sitting and staring at the TV, which he found surprisingly easy to describe. “What do you think?”

“The picture is way nicer than movie screens used to be,” Steve says, gesturing to it. “Cleaner. And the colors are great, far more vivid than before.”

“I feel like I did you a disservice, introducing you to color HD television with CNN. I should have shown you the remastered Wizard of Oz or something.”

“I’ve already seen that,” Steve says, and Tony files that away in a little folder in his head labeled Things I Know About Steve.

“So, our screens are better. So is pretty much everything, I wager. What other observations do you got for me?”

“The people…” A hesitation. “Look different. They definitely dress differently.”

“Yeah, women putting their legs in pant holes, the floozies.”

“I mean, yes, there’s that. But it’s the men too. They all look different. There’s so much less…” He trails off, looking uncertain.

“Cotton?” Tony helpfully supplies.

“Effort,” Steve finishes. “Before, if you wanted to go out, you had to be actually fully dressed. Nice shoes, pressed shirt. Jacket. Women had their hair done. Not to say no one looked bad, but there was this pressure to look together. Nowadays, it doesn’t seem like that holds true.”

“You’re gonna have so much fun at Walmart,” Tony says with wonder.

* * *

Steve asks to go to bed very early, only an hour or so after Tony introduces him to JARVIS, who Steve takes in stride very well, in Tony’s opinion. He’s had one-night stands from _this_ century get more creeped out than Steve’s shrugged, “So it’s a smart robot without a body.”

Tony isn’t sure if Steve leaves to actually sleep or just process, but he lets him go anyway.

He heads down to his workshop, which is fully stocked, but hasn’t been properly lived in in ages.

“JARVIS, you with me, bud?”

“Yes sir,” comes his voice, and Tony smiles. “May I put some information in our system about your guest?”

“Go for it, JARVIS. Scan, the whole shebang. He’ll be here for a while.”

“What is his name?”

“Steve Rogers. You can copy any personal details from any history books about Captain America.”

There’s a pause, and logically, Tony knows he can’t _actually_ throw off his AI, but who knows, JARVIS has been creeping closer to sentience for years now. The way he pauses makes Tony grin.

“Sir?”

“You heard me.”

“Copying now. Also, you have received eleven phone calls from Ms. Potts since yesterday. Do you want me to connect you?”

“Invite her over to the tower. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Very good, sir. Would you like me to open up your latest project while you’re down here?”

“Sure, J,” Tony answers, not thinking.

The Inevitable folder pops up, and Tony freezes in place. He had forgotten.

He had actually managed to forget for about a day.

He taps the reactor, twice, and settles down in a chair in-front of the biggest desktop.

The cursor blinks at him, to the left of #1, asking him what to do about the Iron Man armor.

“You know what, J?” he says, finally. “Open new project, private server. Call it ‘Second Life.’ Start downloading 21stcentury history summary files from the Internet, starting at July 1945 to present day. Make sure to highlight the civil rights movement, gay rights movement, feminist movement, PTSD, battle fatigue, all that Hemingway bull about soldier’s not knowing how to come home. Find a list of Presidents that gives actually accurate, if brief, summaries of their administration. Pull the big news stories of the last five decades too – just stuff like 9/11, fall of the Soviet Union. Delete anything that mentions me. Also, look for best attractions in America. Also new slang. Also make a list of Rolling Stone’s top music from each decade from 1950 on. AFI list of top 100 movies is good as well.”

“Something big planned, sir?” JARVIS asks, the folder popping up on the screen.

“Yeah. Close out of ‘Inevitable’. I got something new.” 


	2. Chapter 2

Steve wakes up for the third time in seven decades.

He finds himself staring up at the ceiling for a long time, not thinking about any of the multitude of things he has to think about. His mind is white static, the buzz of an off-tuned radio, looking at the white ceiling and thinking of absolutely nothing.

He figures he should probably be feeling grief. He’s lost more than probably any other person in history – his home, his culture, his friends, his life, his understanding of life. It’s like it’s too much for his brain to truly process, so instead of wallowing in the tragedy of it, his thoughts shy away from all thoughts, leaving him alone in the quiet of the penthouse.

He wonders without really thinking about it if it’s partly because he already accepted death when he pointed the plane to the ground. If his brain already processed and accepted death, that this isn’t being treated in his head as a continuation of his old life, but instead something brand new, a different place where he hasn’t lost anything.

He also wonders if other people just feel numb when grieving. He doesn’t know, and doesn’t know how to find out.

And so he stares at the ceiling.

He spent most of the night staring out the penthouse window, just watching. From all the way up in the tower, it’s almost hard to tell it’s a place of which he is totally ignorant. The buildings, the lights, the busy streets – it’s all familiar. But everything is just slightly off, like one of those ‘find what’s weird about this picture’ portions of newspapers, where it all looks fine at a glance, but the closer you look, the more you find wrong.

And so he didn’t look too hard.

He eventually tried to sleep. He had a nightmare about Bucky again, like he has every day since Bucky died, which is an unfortunate continuation that he really could have done without. His brain doesn’t seem to get the memo that that was 70 years ago – to him, it hasn’t been a week.

When he finally sits up, he is greeted by a polite, “Good morning, Mr. Rogers.”

Steve startles slightly and looks around, before remembering being introduced to Tony Stark’s robot house thing.

He didn’t exactly get how it worked or what it was, but he also got the feeling that if he tried to take the time to actually _understand_ everything instead of just accept it as is and move on, he’d lose his mind. It’s been his decided mindset since waking up – just nod and question nothing. It has to be easier, in the long run.

Though he does make a mental note to ask Tony when everyone got these robot helpers in the house. Tony said the future didn’t live up to the past’s expectations, but this seemed to surpass them.

“Good morning, JARVIS.”

“Sir has awoken and is currently in the process of getting breakfast started. If you would like to join him, I will direct you to the kitchen.”

Despite the fact he doesn’t really want to, there isn’t really any reason not to, so he lets JARVIS guide him down a flight of stairs and into a kitchen that is easily twice the size of his apartment growing up.

Steve wants to ask if this kind of extravagance is normal nowadays, or if Tony’s just exceptionally rich.

He gets the feeling it’s the latter; something about how Tony presents himself – cool, confident, like he knows he’s worth your time – that just kinda speaks to overwhelming wealth.

Back in the day, it most likely would have pissed Steve off a bit. Growing up in the depression taught Steve a lot, and one of those things was that most rich people like being rich more than they like other people.

But the numb feeling seems to extend even to this matter, so he just greets Tony with an underwhelming, “Hi.”

Steve can’t really tell what Tony is doing. There’s a lot of food, sort of everywhere, and he’s poking at some machine that’s lighting up what’s inside and spinning it. Steve assumes it’s probably not for decoration.

“Oh, Captain Crunch, you’re here, fabulous. So, I was doing some research last night into what it was like back in your days, and something that kept coming up was the food. You guys boiled and canned everything. And without globalization, I bet you’ve never tasted anything but ‘American’ food, which isn’t really a cuisine at all, just kind of mishmashes of other, better stuff, except maybe southern food, but again, that was created by slaves’ culture, so I don’t know how correct it is to really laud that, you know? Though maybe we should appreciate it for its own sake given that, I should really check that out with someone more appropriate than me.”

Tony speaks rapidly, strings of words mashing into each other, and it takes Steve a second to digest what in there is really asking for his comment.

“I mean, I was from an Irish community. I had Irish food.”

“Oh, that’s too bad, I don’t get to introduce you to the wonder that is the versatile potato. But no matter, there’s a lot more to try now, a lot better things to try. I ordered in from all my favorite places. It’s great that every place delivers in New York, you know? What a city. A delivered blowie or a bagel in under a half hour if you know who to call. Anyway. Point being, the food is better. You got to try everything.”

The machine beeps and Tony turns, taking a plate of food out of it. Steve goes to ask, but Tony apparently anticipates him, because he says, “I should give you a pointing tour of modern day kitchens, probably, hm? That’s the fridge, keeps things cold, plugged into the wall so you don’t have to do anything to keep it cold. Yay, no ice boxes. Top of it is the freezer. Again, self-regulating, yay no ice boxes. Then we got the toaster. You put bread of various sorts in it and it gets – toasted. Is there another word for that? No matter. Then the microwaves,” he says, pointing to what was spinning. “Heats food faster than a stove. The stove you should know, same with oven. Dishwasher over there, it washes dishes, yay for well named items. Coffee maker, smoothie maker, I think that’s a food processer which cuts food and which has probably never been used. It’d take forever to show you how to use any of this, so just ask JARVIS if you need help and can’t figure it out. Though you should try yourself first and see if you can figure it out. These are all Stark products and you’re the perfect product tester for our UI given your lack of, you know, knowledge. Okay, ready to eat?”

Steve realizes he’s still standing in the middle of the kitchen, his arms by his side uselessly.

Feeling awkward and slightly steamrolled, he walks over to the table and sits down, and looks rather helplessly at the many – sixteen, his mind helpfully supplies – plates of food.

“Are you going to eat all this?”

“Of course not,” Tony says, like Steve offended him. He takes the seat next to Steve. “I am going to watch you eat as much you want and then send it down like thirty floors to my employee’s lunch room.”

Steve really doesn’t feel much like eating, but Tony went to the trouble of buying it, and he’s staring at him slightly manically, and Steve’s feeling uncomfortable and tired but he’s got to _try,_ right, so Steve internally sighs at himself and takes something from each plate.

 

Tony was right; the food does taste better.

He still isn’t particularly in the eating or enjoying mood, and Tony’s been staring at him like he’s a bug under a microscope the further along he gets, but Steve also doesn’t seem to ever get full, so he’s through plate eleven with he jumps slightly from JARVIS’s voice.

“Sir, Ms. Potts has entered the elevator.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Tony’s been leaning his head on his chin, eyes growing steadily wider as he dictates notes to JARVIS the further Steve gets without stopping. He sits up now, though, and grimaces. “Pepper is my personal assistant. She has every reason to be very mad at me this morning, so brace yourself.”

“Personal assistant?” Steve suddenly realizes he actually has no idea what Tony does.

“For the next ten or so minutes.” Tony shrugs. Steve idly wonders what Tony did to anger her quite that badly if he’s that sure she’s about to quit.

The elevator dings, and Steve can hear the tell-tale sound of heels on wooded floor. When Pepper comes around the corner, Steve can feel his eyes blink in surprise. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but someone so elegant apparently wasn’t it.

“Tony, you better—” She trails off almost immediately when she sees Steve. She blinks once at him, then turns to Tony, with an unmistakable look of _why_ on her face, before turning back to Steve, and slowly walking forward. “Hello, there.”

“Hello,” Steve greets. “Miss Potts, I presume?”

“Pepper,” she corrects. “And you are?”

“Steve Rogers. I’ll be staying with Tony for a bit.”

“Oh.” She looks over to Tony and gives him a smile that even Steve can tell is fake after knowing her for around twenty-eight seconds. “Not a one-nighter, then?”

“Come on, Pepper, I would have called you to kick him out of it was that.”

“You know that isn’t actually in my job description, right?”

“Probably because I had HR write the job ad. Would have been far more accurate if I had a whack at it.”

“You may not have had any responses then, sir,” JARVIS inputs, and Steve has completely lost the thread of this conversation.  

“Shameless isn’t a good character trait, Tony,” she chastises. 

“Unashamed is, though,” he counters, and winks at her.

Steve wants to leave, as these two are obviously close and he feels like an intruder, but can think of no way to extricate himself that won’t call attention back to him. It feels like being nineteen again, wholly visible and completely ignored. It occurs to him that he’s never spent any time after the serum as a civilian. It was all in the war, where coordination and muscles and reflexes matter. He never had to go back to a normal life, to attempting dates and going to the bar with friends and walking in and out of work every day. The serum was a cure to make him important in times of crisis, but maybe it didn’t fix what caused him to be invisible to all his peers back in the day. Maybe that’s more innate. Maybe that’s just him – born and bred to be ignored by attractive, intelligent people.

Steve shakes his head slightly, and focuses back into the conversation going on around him. At some point, Tony stood and is now leaning up against the countertop. Pepper is a couple feet away, pinching her nose in exasperation.  

He picks up a piece of bacon, and tries to look politely interested instead of wildly out of place.

“Okay, before you start yelling, I have an excuse for everything,” Tony says.

Pepper sighs loudly. “Do you have an excuse for disappearing for about a week with no warning and missing your meeting in Japan to introduce the new Stark Phone product launch?”

Tony looks confused but not apologetic, and Steve doesn’t know him all that well yet, but he’d bet everything on his person that Tony had forgotten about whatever meeting that had been.

It takes a second, but once Steve fully processes that sentence, he really wonders how you can have a meeting in Japan and not leave more than a week in advance.

He also hears ‘Stark Phone’ and wonders if Tony makes those little things he was poking on. It’d explain why he hasn’t seemed to set it down since Steve’s met him. He wants to ask, but doesn’t feel like he can interrupt.

“I got invited by SHIELD to a thing. A highly classified thing I cannot tell you about, but a thing, a very last-minute thing, and then that thing has led to this.” He gestures at Steve. “Has led to Steve. Steve will be staying here for the foreseeable future and due to classified circumstances he needs someone to teach him the way of the world.”

Pepper’s standing in the middle of the kitchen, hand on her hip, face pinched, and Steve suddenly feels that familiar trickle of guilt.

“I’m sorry,” he apologizes to Pepper, making both their heads snap to him. “I didn’t realize I was causing problems by being here.”

“I’m sure you’re not, Steve,” Pepper says kindly. “I’m sure this would be fine if I was ever notified about it at all.” Her voice turns pointed, as does her gaze, which shifts back to Tony. “How do you expect me to keep your schedule if you just haphazardly leave and get new projects and things to do without telling me? You thoroughly pissed off Congress a couple of weeks ago. We already got a notice from the DOD that they’re thinking of retracting our Windfarm contract, despite the fact that we already have people on payroll for that—”

“Don’t talk about Windfarm, I’m already feeling gassy, I ate a breakfast burrito—”

“And this whole contract was your idea by the way—”

“Of course it was, everything was my idea—”

“And yet you won’t make a decision about how to—”

“I don’t care about any of this anymore, it’s boring, it doesn’t matter—”

“—fix this, and of course it’s boring, it’s work, Tony—”

“It’s boring, I don’t care, you do it.”

“I am _trying_!” She says, almost a yell, but slightly more dignified. The folder she was holding slams down on the countertop, her hand going up to pinch the bridge of her nose once again. Steve watches her take a stabilizing breath.

“Pepper, just do it. Run the company.”

“I am trying—”

“Stop trying to do it and actually physically do it.”

“I am _trying._ ”

“I need you to do it!”

“I _am_!”

“You’re not _listening to me_. I am trying to make you CEO!”

Both Steve and Pepper blink at that one.

Steve realizes he’s been watching them argue with bacon halfway to his mouth for about a full minute, and drops it, embarrassed, to his plate, and just catches Pepper’s incredulous, “Have you been drinking?”

“No, actually, not today. This is actually a well thought out decision. Sort of. It was a little spur of the moment, but my best decisions are.” She’s still staring at him, and Tony rolls his eyes, and steps forward. He takes Pepper’s hands and looks her in the eye. “Pepper, I’ve been thinking about quitting for months now. I don’t care about it anymore. You’re the only one with the experience and who I trust enough to do this.”

“I am not.” She stops, and blinks. “Tony, you want out of your own company?”

“I’ve made the wise decision to become a hermit for a while.”

“Tony, this doesn’t seem like you—”

“How does shirking responsibility onto someone else not sound like me—”

“If this is some Afghanistan related PTSD crisis—”

“Steve, did you hear that, PTSD? Maybe we can go to group therapy together. ”

“Tony, don’t joke about this—”

“I’m not joking, I’m serious, group therapy is a legitimate—”

“You’re not saying it to be legitimate—”

“—therapy tactic, I know, I took a counseling course in high school—”

“—practice, and PTSD is real, and I’ve been watching you—”

“—or maybe it was earlier, who knows, really—”

“—for signs, and I just think—”

“Pepper,” he says loudly, effectively cutting her off. “I am an eccentric, genius billionaire. Maybe I am tired of the limelight. Maybe I don’t like interviews. Maybe I hired a Russian mail order bride and want to enjoy her for a year in peace and quiet.”

“I swear, if there’s a woman downstairs—”

“Pepper,” Tony says, finally letting his tone shift to serious. “Part of being in my position is getting to decide how I want to live my life. And if I decide I want to change it, then that’s my choice. And no one gets a say, not even you.”

“I know that, Tony,” she answers, voice softening. “You can do what you want, and if you want this, then honestly, great. But it’s just - uncharacteristic. I’m worried about you.”

“Expend your worry on something important.” He puts a hand on her shoulder. “Like how to run a Fortune 1 company.”

“The saying is Fortune 500,” she says, but the corners of her mouth are twitching.

“Yes, but that way you can’t brag about being on top. And you know how I love being on top.”

“Tony, are you sure about this?” she asks. Her tone has noticeably dropped to something soft, and it has Steve looking back down at his breakfast.

“Of course. Draw up the papers, we’ll sign it over as soon as you want. I’m ready to begin my hermit lifestyle here with Steve.”

She smiles at him and then nods, her long, red her flowing over her shoulders as she leans in to kiss him on the cheek.

“Thank you, Tony,” she says. The moment pulses, then ends. She turns to Steve. “Steve, it was a pleasure. I guess I’ll be seeing more of you. Please let me know if you – if you need anything.”

She turns to walk out, heels announcing her exit.

Tony slumps back down in the chair next to Steve.

“She actually could have been quite a bit more pissed. I’m relieved. Wouldn’t want you to get the right impression about what she thinks of me, or anything.”

Steve doesn’t really know what to say to that. Tony spews out egotism and self-deprecation in equal spades, and, honestly, Steve really isn’t sure which one Tony believes or what he’s supposed to believe.

Steve folds his hands in his lap.  “You two…” He trails off, and then makes a gesture with his hands that even he knows is impossible to interpret. By Tony’s baffled expression, he’s right. “You know – is she your girl?”

“My girl Friday, maybe, but she’d probably object to that.”

Steve thinks he’s probably missing context for that to make sense, though it sounds vaguely familiar. 

Tony takes pity on him. “No, she’s not. We almost were, for a hot second. Could have been, maybe. But no, that ship didn’t sail.”

“Why?”

Tony blinks at him, too fast to not be on purpose, then demands, “Why? What do you mean, why?”

“I don’t know,” and great, Steve apparently just treaded on some exposed nerve on accident. “You just seemed like you had something, there.”

“Having _something_ doesn’t make a relationship a good idea.”

“I know,” Steve says quickly. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Pepper’s off limits when it comes to me and her, okay? And you, if you go after her I will actually stab myself in the eye with a spoon, or something, just – do not do that, okay?”

“I’m definitely not going after anyone,” Steve says, feeling a little lost.

There’s a pregnant pause where all they can hear is the running of the fridge. It takes a moment, but Tony sighs, and leans his head into his hand.

“Look,” he says. “Sorry. I’m probably doing a shitty job of convincing you that picking me was the right choice. I just have sort of a particular personality, and it doesn’t turn off. You’ll just have to get used to it. Not that I had much luck with that in with the board of directors, but you’re a superhuman. If anyone can put up with me, it’s you’re bottle-y enhanced brain, eh?”

He pokes at Steve’s head, and Steve finds himself leaning away, feeling a bit like a schoolboy being picked on, though Tony isn’t really being mean.

“So you just gave her the lead position in your company? Is it still a weapon’s manufacturing business?”

He was pretty proud of himself for remembering that Howard was in that in the first place, and feels a stab of _something_ sharp and hot in his stomach when Tony visibly grits his teeth.

“No, Stark Industries is out of the weapons business. Good ol’ dad would roll in his grave.”

That’s the first Steve’s heard that Howard passed. It’s not surprising, but, for some reason, he had assumed Howard was just old and living in a nursing home, or something.

“Anyway,” Tony continues, oblivious to Steve’s mental shifting. “I shut that down last year. We’re exclusively in technology and renewable energy. It’s going splendidly, if I do say so myself, which I do, because I designed it all. Anyway, I was CEO for a long time, now I’m not. Also got a bit of a superhero job on the side.”

Tony says it in a tone that is somehow both cocky and yearning for approval. Steve’s starting to realize Tony doesn’t really have a neutral tone. Everything, every sentence, no matter how mundane, is intensified to an emotional level Steve only hits when well and truly on his way to an episode.

He wonders if this means Tony’s just a highly emotional guy, or if it means he shouldn’t take anything he says seriously.

“Are you enhanced too, then?” Steve asks, nodding at his chest.

Tony looks down at his groin, and Steve immediately follows up with, “Your chest glows.”

“Oh, that.” Tony smiles, all arrogance this time. “I made a couple upgrades to myself.” He motions to the table. “If you’re finished with your 102nd bagel, I have something to show you in more detail.”

 

The Iron Man armor, as Tony calls it, is neat.

He probably doesn’t look impressed enough to Tony’s standards, mostly because he really isn’t sure what it can do, nor does he know what is impressive by today’s standards, so Tony shows him a lot of grainy footage of him blowing up terrorist cells.

“Yeah, it looks good,” he says. Tony glares at him a little, and he wishes, for once, he could know what to say to someone.

“Well,” Tony says. He makes a hand motion, and the screen goes off. “Enough about me. You can find more out about me on the Internet, if you want. Believe about 33% of it. That’s a good rule of thumb for the whole Internet, actually. Wait, has anyone shown you the Internet, yet?”

What follows it he most excruciatingly complicated five hours of Steve’s life. He feels like being sent to bootcamp all over again, where he’s always two steps behind. He’s able to understand the big events well enough – made a big bomb and dropped it, didn’t fight with Russia but it was tense, terrorists are a global worry now, everything has gotten bigger and better and louder, inflation has skyrocketed, global communication is in a great state, lingo has changed a bit, women have more rights but not enough, black people have more rights but not enough, gay people have more rights but not enough – this was the look of the 70s, this was the look of the 80s, this was the look of the 90s. The world continues and the years pass, and on and on it spins.

That’s fine.

It’s just the little things that have him grinding his teeth. The filler he is expected to know, that no one would even think to tell him, like the lights turn off automatically, or when to tap once or twice or swipe left or right or how to long to hold down your fingers when using a touch screen, or that cigarettes are apparently bad for you, or that it makes people wince when you call cigarettes fags.

And it’s been about a day.

Is it going to be three years later, and he stumbles through a conversation at the grocery store, offending someone just by his own ignorance, because he can’t assimilate years and years of background knowledge no matter how hard he tries?

When you’re born, you stand on the shoulders of giants, each year growing taller. Children are starting higher than he, and no one thinks to make a manual of how to climb.

The third time he uses a word that Tony has to look up the meaning of, he wonders why he’s even bothering. If he should even bother.

Tony, oblivious to his internal stress, decides to make a list of what words and slang to drop and what some more modern sayings mean – Steve has no idea if it’s comprehensive, but he’s definitely glad his brain got sharper with serum, because good God, he’s going to sound like a moron probably a hundred times even with it – when he starts to feel himself actually losing it, just a little.

“Tony,” he interrupts. He wasn’t even sure what Tony was going on about, something about skipping the sixties since it was no longer relevant and didn’t want to introduce some words to Steve’s vocabulary. “Do you have a gym?”

* * *

Punching things while thinking nothing is better than sitting in silence while thinking nothing, though Steve could be damned to say why.

Tony stays and watches for a little while, but leaves after about a half hour, saying, “I can’t tell if watching you is giving me an inferiority complex or if it just hurts my fists in sympathy.”

Steve had ignored him, and Tony had walked out, muttering.

Vaguely, it registers with him that he’s kind of being an asshole. Somewhere in his head, he knows that Tony is doing him a huge favor, letting him stay in his place, taking his time out to teach him, giving him a gym to work out in.

Someplace, deep inside, he knows he should be giving Tony more of his attention, trying to follow him, trying to make a friend in him, trying to know him.

But as he beats the punching bag, he has no thoughts, and he purposefully pushes away any of the feelings of regret or shame.

He just lets the anger rise.

And when the punching bag goes across the room, he gets another.

* * *

In the next two weeks, Steve does three things as purposefully and consistently as he can: read or listen to anything and everything he can, work out until even he is starting to lag, and avoid Tony.

The first one is self-explanatory. What with the lack of sleeping, being able to have the Internet read to him while he’s in the gym, and with the enormous amounts of specifically complied information a-la Tony, Steve actually feels like he may be getting a bit of a handle on what the world is and has been.

There’s the worse – like how America’s foreign policy seemed to peak with WWII, apparently global warming exists, fashion has become almost completely inexplicable, chain stores have become the norm instead of the exception, Brooklyn is now for the posh, mass shootings are now a thing, the Catholic church scandal in Ireland, people haven’t gotten any better at telling the truth just because they got a global communication platform, and so on.

There’s what hasn’t gotten better – homelessness, orphans, abused wives and children, poor working conditions, prejudice, stale bread, dishonest politicians, how long it takes to cook a roast, bigger money and dumber heads, rude people, sickness.

But there’s the good. By God, is there the good.

Global poverty is down. Global hunger is down. Human rights is something people care about. Torturing animals is illegal. You can travel around the word and barely blink. Cultures can intermix. Women have far more control over their own lives. The Geneva Convention. Music. Movies. Vaccines. Food. Cars. Air-conditioning. Dishwashers. The FDA. Washing machines. Anti-biotics. The vast array of news. Environmentalism. Road upkeep. Education. Tolerance.

People complain a lot about the state of the world, Steve knows. JARVIS told him. But they’re looking upward from their place on the shoulders of giants, imagining higher.

Steve is still a thousand feet below, marveling at how high they have gotten.

It isn’t perfect – trust him, he realizes that – but he also realizes it IS better. In a lot of ways, and in a lot of ways he doesn’t think the world will be able to take that step back from.

He listens to JARVIS’s reports of information Tony has complied as he works out, which brings him to point 2: working till he drops.

The stupider part of his head wants to say it’s because he’s afraid the serum will stop working given his years of inactivity.

The smarter part of his head knows he doesn’t want the serum to keep him alive forever.

The realistic part of his head knows it's because it's the easy thing to do.

Which brings him to point 3.

Being alive isn’t the end of the world. But, in a way, it’s the end of _his,_ and it'sin a way that no one will understand, and no one will relate to.

He knows Tony wants to show him around and teach him. That first week, Tony was startling persistent, sending in food every day for Steve to try, and coming around every morning, afternoon, and night around to ask if Steve wants to do this, learn that, go here, try this over there. He was also startlingly understanding when Steve always, always grunted a no. He just left with a perky, “Okay, then,” and headed out, presumably to work on something in his workshop. Since files kept popping up in JARVIS’s list, he knows Tony was still spending at least some of his time on him, despite Steve’s constant rejection. 

Week two, things started to shift a bit.

It’s like at the two-week mark, the crisis mode ended for everyone else, and there became an expectation, unspoken but palpable, that he’s going to be Okay now. Which is interesting, because just yesterday he found out that his favorite brand of soda was discontinued and punched a hole straight through the wall and then three hours later broke two plates for not fitting into the dishwasher. And he can feel Tony’s patience starting to wane, the background disapproval and confusion that he’s not Alright, or not Getting Better.

Two days ago, Tony had walked in on him sketching. It wasn’t anything he was putting a lot of thought or emotion into, at least not consciously, but when Tony came in the room and perched on the back of the couch, he felt himself folding it closer to his chest on instinct.

“What’s that?” Tony had asked. When he muttered, “not much,” Tony had reached for it, muttering, “Jesus, do I need to go get a crowbar, your grip is like King Kong, if this isn’t a beautiful lady I am going to be disappointed.”

Steve had let it go, in the end, because it wasn’t worth it. It was just a picture of a clock melting, something reminiscent of a painter he used to like and also just something he had been feeling.

Tony had looked it, said, “Very Dali-esque, nice.”

Steve doesn’t really remember his reply, something rude that was akin too, “Stop looking up shit from my time period to make me feel normal.”

Tony just shot him a despairing look, said, “He’s still popular now, dipshit,” and Steve had been so inanely frustrated with himself for being rude, for not having known that, for more nonsense, that he had just stalked out, throwing the drawing at Tony as he passed.

He doesn’t know what Tony has been thinking, but it’s definitely not anything positive about him, and he wishes he could just stop, change his behavior, say, “OK, I’m done being irritable and confused, let’s be friends and learn about the world together!”, but he just –

It’s just –

Tony takes so much energy.

And not even because Tony is an energy-holic who a fourth grader would have a hard time keeping up with.

It’s just –

People have never been Steve’s forte even when he’s in his best environment. Back in Brooklyn, he can remember school boys beating him up in alleys and girls ignoring him as he tries to get their attention during dates. In bootcamp, he can remember boys hazing him and spitting at him when he couldn’t keep up. When he was Captain America, he never knew how to handle women’s attention properly – wanted or not. He wasn’t even particularly good at relating to the men he lead, once he became a _real_ Captain (or close enough) – he just told them what to do and they did it.

The only person he ever was able to be around without substantial, concentrated effort was Bucky, and that was more because Bucky had decided at some point to keep Steve no matter what, and there was nothing Steve could do to dissuade him.

Tony is Steve’s only option for a friend, but that doesn’t mean Steve would actually be able to _make_ a friend out of him. He likes Tony, he does, or he thinks he does, but how can he make Tony like him? It would take so much effort to try, to be sociable, to be around another human. It’s far easier to hide away, grunt responses, and speak only to JARVIS, who he can’t disappoint and who doesn’t have feelings to care about hurting.

(Steve thinks anyway. He hasn’t asked Tony what JARVIS actually is yet).

He’s constantly tired and constantly short-tempered and another person, especially one like Tony, would be too difficult to try to relate to.

So what’s the point of trying?

* * *

The TV in the gym is talking about Tony again.

Apparently over 2 weeks without a public appearance from him is concerning.

Compounded with the fact that apparently Tony did, in fact, quit his own company, people have a lot to speculate about.

Some Russian scientist named Vanko speculates that Tony’s arc reactor is failing and he’s too much of a coward to own up to his technological failings and the fact that he probably can no longer power the Iron Man suit, and the only way to disprove him is to come out in public.

Steve’s seen the reactor just that morning, so he ignores that one completely.

Steve mutes it after the next couple people, rolling his eyes at the theory that Tony is cooking up media attention so he can dramatically drop into a party in the Iron Man suit.

According to JARVIS, Tony has been spending almost his entire days inside his workshop. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that something like what the TV is saying is true – but Steve doesn’t buy it.

Steve’s been reading up on Tony. Or, more accurately, asking JARVIS. Steve tried the Internet first, like Tony suggested, but so much of it was nothing he wanted to know. Women that Tony had dated, outfits he wore, public appearances at media events. Most of the articles of substance seemed to be speculative in nature and that just doesn’t sit right with Steve, especially after the one he read that said Tony would be more likely to kick a homeless man than let him stay in his house. Steve’s living proof that that’s bullshit, so he closes it out and asks JARVIS to give him a summary of Tony’s life.

It’s interesting.

It’s also edited, but not in the places Steve expects. All of his youthful exploits seem to have been kept in, as well as a long and truly painful collection of the misuse of weapons Tony designed, due to Tony’s negligence. Truly, JARVIS paints a pretty unflattering picture. So much so that Steve, one day, asks incredulously and completely without thinking he’d get a response, “Does he use his money for _anyone_ other than himself?”

And so comes a list, a truly eye bugging list, of all the charities and organizations Tony’s donated to.

It takes Steve a bit to figure out, but he realizes that Tony must have told JARVIS what to say if Steve asked about him, but probably didn’t think to forbid JARVIS from answering any information that wasn’t classified.

So Steve finds himself in a word game of what questions to ask that haven’t been poorly tailored.

He doesn’t get a straight answer about the arc reactor (he keeps getting redirected to a SI press release), but he does get a laundry list of technological advancements, a staggering amount of academic achievements, a surprisingly absent list of girlfriends, and more and more and more that has Steve blinking in surprise.  

The picture he gets of Tony is complex and odd and dynamic and hard to put in a box – and, despite himself, he’s slightly intrigued.

Which makes it all the more impossible to think of trying to get to know him.

It’s just too damn _hard._ And for what end?

To have a friend?

Unlikely he’d manage that, especially with someone like _that._

It’s pointless.

An hour after turning off the TV, he registers that Tony’s walked in the room, but he keeps his head in, staring straight at the bag, rhythmically punching it just enough that it’ll look impressive but won’t actually break the thing.

“You know,” Tony says conversationally. “I gave up my CEO position to keep you company.”

“I did not ask you to do that,” Steve replies, not stopping. Sweat is starting to obscure his vision.

“I’m not saying I want the position back, God forbid, no, what I’m saying is that it’s really hard to spend all this extra time keeping you company if you won’t let me keep you company. I get that this is all overwhelming, but you haven’t left the tower since you got here, which rivals me on my worst times, really, which is saying something, and isn’t there stuff you want to see and do, good god, this gym isn’t _that_ exciting, even though I built it so I know it’s _impressive,_ it is still a—”

“It’s not that it’s overwhelming!” Steve snaps, interrupting. He tries to imagine Tony as anyone else. Commander Phillips from bootcamp. Anyone else, anyone who he doesn’t care about anymore. “It’s that I don’t see the point.”

“The point is you could be punching a punching bag back in 1940, so how about you do something that’s maybe, I don’t know, new?” Tony says, like Steve’s an idiot.

“Why do you care, anyway?”

“You give my life meaning, doll,” Tony drolls.

Steve stops. He grabs the bag on its way back, and holds it still. He runs a hand over his face, but doesn’t turn. “I just don’t see the point of taking the time to go out and be in this world when all I am ever going to want to is to be back in my old one. Or just not be in this one.”

“The point, Rogers,” Tony says, a little scathing. Steve should turn to look at him. He should. “Is because you don’t have a choice. Like it or not, this is your reality now. You got a second chance at life. We don’t all get those. There’s plenty of people out there dying before their time for dumbass reasons, but you – you got a second chance. And I’ll damned if I let you throw it away because of a little depression.”

Steve can feel himself getting angry, it bubbling up from some deep trench inside himself, and it’s making him want to vibrate out of his skin, and it’s enough that he turns to look at Tony.

He leaning in the doorway, wearing one of those T-Shirts with the name of something Steve vaguely remembers JARVIS talking about, something called NASA. He’s in jeans and he looks casual and he looks kinda pissed, and the anger fuels Steve into saying, “It’s my life, isn’t it? Can’t I choose how I want to live it? Whether I want to live it?”

“No,” Tony answers immediately. “You will live it, whether you like it or not. You’ll thank me one day.”

“Right, because you are the leading authority on what I think, of course.”

Tony’s face pulls together, and when he takes a step forward, it occurs to Steve that they are probably in a real, proper fight here.

And they haven’t actually had a friendly conversation yet that went beyond ‘Hi, what’s your name, here’s a laundry list of shit you don’t know.’

“You know what your problem is, Rogers?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“You’re too much of an army drone to ever come back into civilian life. This isn’t about not getting used to the 21st century, it’s about you not being able to come back from World War II. You want to be pointed in a direction, told to go and punch something, come back, and do it again. You don’t want to think for yourself, come up with a mundane life for yourself. You just want it black and white, this is wrong, this is right, and here’s the way to make what’s wrong into right. But the world isn’t divided like that anymore and you don’t get the luxury of being a mindless soldier. You have to come up with a way to fill your days that doesn’t have anything to do with heroism, like normal people. You need to wake up to reality, Cap because I don’t think you actually ever did.”

The words would be a lot easier to ignore if they didn’t hold a sharp edge of truth to them.

But it’s reductionist and crude and way too confident, and Steve can feel his temper rise.

“You don’t think I’ve lost something just beyond the war?” Steve demands. “Really? The only reason I might not want to be around is I don’t want to function outside of _the war?_ ”

“Shoe and the foot are the same size, Rogers.”

“It isn’t the war; it has to do with the fact that I’m not going to get better! Not wanting to be around isn’t—”  

“Look, I know a little something about wanting to be dead, Steve!” Tony shouts, and that actually takes Steve aback. “Almost did it a few times. I know what it’s like to wish you’d never been born or been saved. But the only, and I do mean only, good things I’ve ever done, the only good legacy I’ll leave, are things I did after those moments. After wanting to die, not wanting to make it out, after flirting so much with death I was basically at third base with it! If I had died, the company, the stopping the weapons, Iron Man, you – none of it would have happened. If I can’t go back to the start, I’d rather go to the end, however bitter. And you will cheat yourself of the opportunity to have that in your future. Of that moment when you realize it’s better, that _you’re_ better, that you’ve _done something better._ Get out of my face with that bullshit that nothing improves. If nothing improves, I’d have been better off dying last year.

“You need to stop living in the past. I’m a futurist, and there’s nothing that’s going to come out of you just treading water. Sink or swim. And I am _not_ going to let you sink. You can fight against me with those giant muscles swimming the other way if you feel you have to, but I am _not letting you give up_.”

He spins and exits, leaving Steve standing there, sweat drying and heart pounding.

* * *

Since coming back, he’s been trying to follow to paths that have him heading in two opposite directions at once.

Plan A is giving life a second change plan, which has him listening to JARVIS, learning of the world, reading up on Tony, catching up on what he’s missed, going outside and watching the sunset from the roof.

Plan B is giving up on life plan, which has him ignoring Tony, refusing to see anyone else, refusing to make plans in the future, and not leaving the tower since he got there.

He needs to make a decision about what path to take or he’ll split in two and cause more damage than either path alone.

 _Two roads diverged,_ Steve thinks. _And I took the one less traveled by._

He leaves the gym.

“JARVIS,” he asks. “Will you lead me to Tony?”

* * *

He’s in his workshop, banging a sheet of metal.

Steve walks in, gathers all the courage he doesn’t have, and says without any preamble, “Okay. So what to do I do?”

To Tony’s credit, he doesn’t miss a beat. He turns, looks Steve dead in the eye, and says, “Therapy is a good place to start.”

“Okay,” Steve agrees instantly. He’s been reading about therapy when he got to the PTSD stuff – it seems reasonable, that there’s people trained to help guide thoughts. “And what else?”

“Whatever you want. You could do anything. Men’s modeling would love to have you. Join SHIELD. Learn yoga. Buy a kitten. It doesn’t matter. You just need to do something. What do you do for fun?”

Steve considers the question, really considers it. “I don’t know,” he answers honestly. “I don’t really know anything about myself anymore.”

“We’re a matching set,” Tony says, grinning. He drops the crowbar with a clang. “I know all too much about myself.”

Steve smiles a little, then admits, “I just don’t know what to do with myself. You were right, at least in a way. It’d be easier if there was a battle to jump back into. I want to make the world better, but when there isn’t an obvious enemy, I don’t know what to do. My time in the tower feels wasted. Any job requires too much interaction with people, and I don’t have any modern skills. I’d like to dedicate my life to something that makes me feel useful, but if God would only tell me _what_.”

“Have you considered going back into the army?” Tony asks, and Steve snorts without thinking.

“I didn’t like being propaganda then, when I even believed in the cause.”

“Hey, it doesn’t necessarily have to be propaganda. You don’t need to admit who you are. I’m sure they’d enjoy your muscles and reflexes in the actual war.”

“No, it’s just not the same. From what I read, that’s not a hill I am willing to die on.”

“Wow, some American patriot you are,” Tony says, and Steve thinks he can read the teasing in his voice. “We gotta strip those stars and stripes off your uniform.”

“The costume wasn’t my idea. I didn’t sign up to be a war poster for America. I just don’t like bullies; it doesn’t matter who they are. Even if it’s America. Maybe especially.”

“Booo. Some Captain America you are, not supporting us in our time of war.”

Steve feels a trickle of amusement that surprises him a little. “Right, I forgot, you’re mister war-supporter, Mister System of No Accountability and Let Me Shut Down My Weapons Manufacturing Because I Can’t Abide By These Abuses—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony interrupts. “But _I’m_ not America’s poster boy.”

Steve’s mind flicks to magazines, the Internet, CNN. “You sure about that?” 

Tony holds his gaze for a beat, and then shoves the sheet metal off the table, where it clatters, echoing in the basement. He brushes his hands on his jeans and walks over to Steve. He puts his hands in his pockets and rocks on his heels, looking considering.

For the first time, it really hits Steve that Tony is just a person. Not a representation of the future, not some scary-future figurehead, not a even a stranger – just a person, with thoughts and emotions and who has to eat and drink and sleep and walk by himself.

There really isn’t anything to be scared of.

“A job may be premature,” Tony says. “How about just doing _something_ with your days?”

“I know,” Steve says, and then stresses, “But _what?_ ” 

Tony shrugs, hands raising in the air. “What makes you happy?”

Steve wants to answer, but, truthfully — “I don’t know.”

Tony looks up, head cocking, and a smile starting to break out.

“An unknown variable.” His eyes gleam. “This calls for hypotheses. And testing.”

 “Okay.” Steve nods. That feeling inside his chest – the irritable, temperamental, half-a-step-from-an-emotional-breakdown feeling – finally seems to take a step back, settling down where he won’t be missed. Maybe all it needed was a push. “Okay. Let’s start again.”

* * *

They’re well into making another list, a very long list, of potential things to do and try, when Tony says he has to leave to take care of something.

Steve realizes at that moment that he’s been successfully interacting with someone for over an hour, and he’s actually a little proud of himself.

“Okay, Tony,” he says. A slight pause, then, “Thank you. For – you know, everything.”

“No problem,” Tony says, then shrugs, and ruins it a little with, “It’s what I do, be awesome, I can’t help it.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. But thanks for being willing to be my friend.”

Tony nods, a sort of weird one, like that’s an odd thing to say, and makes to leave. He pauses in the doorway, and Steve looks back up.

“If we’re actually going to be friends, there’s something you should know, actually.”

“What’s that?” Steve asks.

Tony seems hesitant in a way that Tony is never hesitant, and it has Steve sitting up straighter.

“Tony?”

“Just – it’s not a good idea to get close to me. And I don’t mean that in the bullshit way people say that when they’re trying to sound cool, I actually mean that it’s a genuinely bad idea. In about a year, I’m…”

He takes a breath – not a sigh, but something noticeable, and Steve can practically see the thoughts running past his eyes.

“You’re?” Steve prompts.

Tony purses his lips, looks down, and then nods to himself. He looks up, and says, “I’m going somewhere. Permanently. I’m not going to be able to stay in your life. This whole thing with you is my last project while I’m here. After that, I’m gone.”

“Where are you going?” Steve finds himself asking.

“Classified,” Tony says with a grin. “But I’m just warning you. I’m not a good idea for personal investment.”

“Duly noted.”

Tony raps his knuckles against the door before leaving, which Steve’s learning is his version of a goodbye.

As he goes back to adding items onto his list, he does spare a thought to wonder where on Earth that Tony could be going where he couldn’t keep in contact through his phone.


	3. Chapter 3

Once Steve gets over being a little bitch, he’s actually kind of great.

It takes some time for Tony to realize this – though, in retrospect, not as much as he may have thought it would if he had thought about any of this before suggesting it. It probably would have taken him longer to know Steve if he had anything else to devote his attention, but with his utter concentration, he gets there.

Steve isn’t the easiest guy to get to know, which he makes that plainly obvious early on. Even when he isn’t avoiding Tony like he’s a drunken one-night stand, he’s quiet and introverted and seems to take the saying ‘playing your cards close to your chest’ to a brand new, occasionally infuriating, level. No matter what conversation opener Tony tries, he gets little in response, just a few words, maybe a small smile if he’s lucky, and constant moving eyes sizing Tony up without saying a word.

But Tony’s good at pushing people out of their comfort zones. He prods and annoys and pokes until people get fed up and inevitably turn and push back.

Except Steve doesn’t push back.

Steve grinds his feet in the dirt, stands with his shoulders back and chin up, and refuses to move. He’s more stubborn than a mule, and Tony’s met some asses in his day.

But Tony prides himself being a  _problem solver,_ so he just rethinks his strategy. He can't get Steve to move, to change, to open up, especially at first. He eventually asks JARVIS to write out summaries of all their interactions, and Tony takes notes like he's back in grad school. 

He hasn't put this much effort into understanding another person in probably, like,  _ever,_ but Tony’s not complaining.

He normally would, probably. He’s never related well to others and playing nice has never been a skill he’s listed on a resume. People are boring. Spending every waking moment with one person just trying to get to know someone?

Normally, Tony’s hell.

But this isn’t the same.

Part of it is the fact that he’s dying. Every day feels slightly worse. He’s getting weaker, he’s getting tired, and he can feel all the strings inside him slowly starting to be cut, one by one, like a puppet about to fall. There’s something strangely comforting about doing something as low-stakes as teaching Steve how to play modern board games while also doing something as important as teaching Steve about the modern world. It’s low effort but matters, and it’s – it’s calming.

Part of it is something left over from Afghanistan. He’d probably need a professional to properly say, but ever since coming back and having his world view shifted like spinning a head 180 degrees, he just hasn’t had a major interest in being a public figurehead anymore. He likes building tech, he likes designing, he even likes blowing up weapons of destruction in terrorist cells. He does not, however, particularly like landing the Iron Man armor in the middle of a giant party and having people paw at it while he sips on a mojito. One day, he probably would have. And it’s easier to pretend that he still does. But, honestly, it’s a relief to count those days behind him. It’s like taking off a mask that’s been on your face for forty years – he can finally breathe.

But, if he’s being honest, most of it is just Steve.

Tony doesn’t know if it just the hyper-fixation he has on him, but Steve's just – he's interesting to try to figure out. That's always been a problem for Tony - computers have a right answer, people don't. But here's the thing - people _do,_ if you take the time to know them, to find what makes them tick. And getting to understand Steve, getting to that right answer, getting the equal signs to balance, feels like more of accomplishment than maybe anything since JARVIS.  

Once Tony knows what buttons not to push, starts to anticipate how to ask questions to get an answer, figures out what's most likely to make Steve laugh and what's more likely to make him clam up - it gets to be just plain  _enjoyable._ Like a math equation that he was able to Good Will Hunting out. 

Maybe Tony just hasn't put enough energy into other people in the past.

Maybe other people just suck in comparison to Steve.

Steve's so pleasant to be around. He's quiet to Tony's brash, thoughtful to Tony's thoughtless, kind to Tony's barbs, opinionated to Tony's flippancy, the artist to Tony's scientist, the shield to Tony's sword.

As cliché as ying-yang thing may be, Tony could get used to it.

Though it takes some time to get there.

* * *

On the fourth night after Steve’s-not-avoiding-me-and-causing-me-to-have-a-mental-breakdown-alone-in-my-room, Tony’s struggling to sleep once again. He gives up after about twenty minutes and makes his way down to the kitchen, hoping that maybe some tea or something will help. When he enters, he almost stops and turns around.

Steve’s sitting at the table, head in one hand, staring blankly out the window. He has a mug of something in front of him, but it’s not steaming.

Tony steels himself, because what’s all this about, anyway – helping Steve, the man from out of time, a hero, get back to normal. He’s gotta put some effort in, right?

“Good night, Spangles?” Tony asks, and Steve jumps.

He turns around and sees Tony and gives a pained smile and half wave.

“Hi Tony,” and oh, he sounds so tired.

“Can’t sleep?” Tony asks, heading towards the cupboard.

“I slept for 70 years. I think I have my fill.”

Tony pauses, his hand on a mug. He glances over at Steve, who looks like he was actually expecting that line to work.

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s how biology works.”

“Leave me alone,” Steve responds mildly. “I’m a senior citizen.”

Tony unwittingly barks out a laugh, which it seems like neither of them expected.

Tony fills his mug with water and sets it in the microwave, then turns to fully face Steve.

“Hey,” he says, on a whim. “Did you have legos back when?”

“Legos?” Steve repeats. His brow is furrowed. “Wait, aren’t those waffles or something? I saw them in the freezer.”

“Hey JARVIS,” Tony says, fingers tapping on the countertop. “I know what we’re doing tonight. Find someone somewhere willing to give me a couple million of them and deliver, pronto.”

 

That night, Tony finds out Steve was an artist. That night, Tony also finds out that pairing an artist with an engineer and enough legos to fill the entire living room and unlimited time means ending up with a wall-sized Mona Lisa whose arms are actually functional with a rudimentary joint system that means she can pick up and pour cups of coffee with moderate success.

That night, Tony also finds out he can, actually, still feel the joy that comes with pointless fun, even if he hasn’t felt it in decades.

* * *

On day five-after, which is actually day 18, Tony spends over an hour in his room trying to come up with a single idea of what to do today.

He takes a moment being glad he’s not a father – how do you _entertain_ kids all day, Jesus Christ – when he gets the idea to get his tailor up there and make Steve a decent set of modern clothes.

Steve agrees, if unenthusiastically, and as the tailor measures, Tony watches and prances around and makes comments that he’s quite positive never made it through his filter, just trying to fill the stilted air that’s suffocating the room.

He, unthinkingly and uncaring about the answer, asks Steve what color was most popular for men’s suits back in the 40s.

Steve’s brow furrows as he looks into space, and, after a moment, he looks down at his stocking feet and says, “I don’t remember.”

The nervous bundle of energy in Tony’s chest tightens, and he makes some pointless comment that he definitely didn’t consider before saying, runs a hand through his hair, and finds himself three minutes later standing with his back against the hallway wall, eyes closed, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath.

 

That night, Steve asks him to watch Casablanca.

Tony agrees.

They don’t say a word through the whole thing, and part of it is deathly uncomfortable, but something feels looser by the end.

* * *

On day 19, bright and early at 10AM, Steve is standing in-front of the coffee maker when Tony walks into the kitchen.

Tony, a little bewildered and mostly still half-asleep, doesn’t really take that for the signal it obviously is that Steve wants something, and instead walks forward, and tries to elbow him out of the way.

Steve’s middle feels like chiseled marble, so he doesn’t actually move an inch, and Tony finds himself looking up, feeling a little betrayed and a lot confused.

“Hey,” he says. “What gives? Move your ass.”

 “Tony,” Steve says seriously. “I was thinking. I’d like an animal.”

Steve is obviously expecting Tony to ask why given how taken aback he looks when Tony just shrugs and says, “sure, whatever, JARVIS, have an animal shelter bring all their dogs and cats by sometime today and I’ll pay their salaries for a month,” and then knocks his shoulder into Steve’s hard enough that he actually takes a step back, and there it is, the unobstructed coffee maker.

It’s noon by the time the animals arrive. JARVIS was polite enough to warn the security desk, God bless his binary soul, but they all come up via-elevator.

There’s probably eight cats and about thirteen dogs. And look, it’s not that Tony _dislikes_ animals, because he doesn’t – they’re soft and cute and good to pet and he can appreciate something that hangs around no matter what he does and can’t understand a word he says – but they’re work and take attention and he really, really doesn’t want to hurt something on accident just by not paying attention, so Tony hides out in the kitchen and watches as Steve cements himself as America’s perfect hero by letting a baker’s dozen tongues lap all over him.

There’s one cat who doesn’t seem to get the memo that Tony’s just a spectator, climbing up on the kitchen counter next to him and batting her head into his hand. He pets her absently, scratching behind her ears and playing with her fur.

After a few moments, he realizes Steve’s looking at him.

“What?” he asks, a little self-consciously.

“Didn’t realize you liked cats,” Steve says, but he’s still _looking._

“Cats are fine,” Tony says, hand still on her head. “Cats ride roombas, cats keep the internet alive, cats don’t need to be taken out every ten minutes.”

Steve mouths _roombas_ to himself and Tony internally goes _oops_ – he’s really trying not to confuse Steve, okay – when Steve stands and tells the nice volunteer lady who has been in the corner staring at the Picasso on the wall like she’s an art major that they want to adopt the cat that Tony’s been touching.

“Hey,” Tony objects. “Don’t choose based on me. This is your thing, your pet.”

“I want one we both like,” Steve shrugs. “I just want something to depend on me. But this is your place. You have to like her too.”

“I thought you would want a dog,” Tony says, because, really, he did.

“You seem to like the cat. You went all—” Steve shrugs, and looks a little uncomfortable as he finishes, “I don’t know, gentle. You’re usually so, so—I don’t know, fast. Rough. But she got you all—”

Steve makes a strange hand gesture, and Tony’s supremely uncomfortable that a _cat_ of all things is highlighting his weaknesses, so he just nods briskly, says “We’re naming it Roomba,” and then walks out.  

* * *

On day twenty, Roomba pushes a salt shaker off the counter and somehow, perfectly into Steve’s meal, and he looks at her with such disappointed dismay that Tony laughs until he cries.

* * *

Day twenty-one, Steve learns how to fix a vacuum cleaner, and Tony shows him how to break it until it’s way more awesome.

* * *

Day twenty-two through twenty-nine, Steve learns about Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, Disney, and Indiana Jones. Tony learns that Steve looks like he’s bored all the time but actually only falls asleep during dialogue heavy parts, that he really likes modern special effects, and likes sweet popcorn flavorings more than savory.

Tony re-learns that he likes movies. He never has the time to make it to a theater, and tends to just put ones he was interested in on in the background while he’s building shit. He loved them as a kid, when they kept him company when he was alone, but hasn’t really truly indulged in years.

* * *

On day thirty-two, Steve makes the mistake of asking Tony what legacy he wants to leave behind.

“That I’m awesome, better than everyone else, and made cool-ass shit no one else could figure out.”

Steve frowns. “That’s what you want your life to amount to?”

“It’s the best I can hope for,” Tony says, with probably too little mirth, because Steve just looks more unhappy.

“What does that even mean? That’s not aiming high.”

“It is when you have a lot to live down,” Tony counters.

“So that’s why you’ve dedicated your life to technology? To bring about good?”

“That and tracking down my weapons,” Tony adds on. Steve looks a little blank, so he clarifies, “I shut down the weapons manufacturing part of Stark Industries, and I created Iron Man to help me track down where all the weapons went that have my name on them that were sold out from under me.”

“So you do care,” Steve says triumphantly, like he just made a point, and Tony feels a spark of irritation that is in real danger of igniting. “You care that your name is on them, what they think of you, your legacy.”

“Stuff it, Rogers. I don’t care about my name, if they think I sent them. I care that my name being on them means I had something to do with them being there. If they blow, that’s on me. If they kill, those lives are on me.”

Steve just stares at him, like he’s trying to mentally fit him in a box and Tony just won’t go no matter how hard he pounds the lid. “What’s driving you is…responsibility?” Steve says slowly, like that’s a piece that just doesn’t fit into the box even by sight.

“Or guilt,” Tony says, far more honest than he’d usually be. “I don’t know, Steve. If you have the chance to save lives, to lay down your life for someone else’s, and you don’t, isn’t that on you? Haven’t you ever felt like that?”

Steve just nods and swallows visibly. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. I know what that feels like.”

The conversation never comes back up. 

* * *

On day thirty-three, Steve brings Tony up to the top of the tower to watch the sunset. “The air is cleaner,” Steve says, when Tony asks if there’s anything different about New York from up on high. “But that—” he points to the sun going underneath the city, the reds, the purples, the dark blue taking over. “That’s still the same, even now.”

For the first time in his life, Tony watches the sunset until it’s gone.

* * *

On day thirty-four, Tony stops counting.

* * *

“Pepper!” Tony exclaims into his phone. “How is the CEO-ing going?”

“Stressful,” she answers, and he can hear it in her voice. “Why is the board more concerned with your disappearance than they are with the company? No one even opened their binder about the company’s new values and direction launch. There were important things in there, about re-management, expanding the technology factories and facilities, hiring new software engineers, what to do with all of the weapons experts on hire—”

“Hey Miss Potts, not to be a total dick, but given I am no longer in the company, was there something that you called about that pertains to me?”

There’s a silence, and he knows he is being a total dick.

Steve apparently does too, from his place on the couch in the workshop, because Tony gets a truly disapproving glare.

“Well,” she says, after a moment. “It’s been about a month since you decided – to go your new direction. I wanted to give you the time off without annoying you, because God knows you needed some time to relax. But I wanted to check in and see if you still—”

She’s obviously searching for something not offensive, so he just finishes it for her. “If I still don’t want anything to do with the company and want to continue my self-imposed hermit lifestyle inside my multi-million-dollar tower and lab?”

“Yes,” she agrees immediately. “That.”

“Yes, Pepper,” he says, and he hopes it’s patient. “I will let you know if I change my mind.”

“Okay, Tony,” she says. “I also wanted to let you know that I am sending someone over for you to interview.”

“Interview?” Tony repeats, putting down the rubix cube he was fiddling with while talking. “Why would I interview—”

“And she’s getting there right now, according to her text,” Pepper interrupts. “So you don’t have time to cancel. Bye, Tony!”

She hangs up on him, and wow, Tony was out-maneuvered by someone more than 2000 miles away. Impressive, Miss Potts.

There’s a woman who is entering his lab – really, Pepper, you had to give her the access code – who Tony doesn’t recognize. She’s pretty, like, _damn,_ pretty, with large, curly red hair and a suit that knows exactly what her figure looks like.

Out of the corner of his eye, Tony can see Steve sit up straight, and it annoys him for a reason he can’t, or won’t, identify.

Tony jumps off his chair and hurries over to her, effectively cutting off and standing between her and Steve.

“Hi,” she says, and her voice has just that perfect lilt of huskiness that Tony would ordinarily find himself leaning into if Steve wasn’t standing literally about a foot behind him. “Ms. Potts sent me to interview with you to be your new personal assistant. My name’s Natalie Rushman.”

He thinks about making a crack about definitely wanting her as personal as possible, but he can almost physically feel Steve’s presence behind him, and while he’s not one for shame, he is apparently one to care about other’s opinions for once, so he just smiles, quick and bright, and rattles off, “I don’t need an assistant, but thank you. You can leave through the elevator. Or stairs, if you want, though I really don’t think you need the exercise.”

He turns to go, but she catches him on the elbow. The way her hand lingers on his has some internal bells in Tony’s head dinging - flirting, _flirting,_ potential sex, _potential sex._ “Mr. Stark, Ms. Potts was quite insistent you’d need someone to look after your affairs.”

He considers it, for half a second. There’s always _something_ someone wants from him - college visit, speech at a summit, look after a company, do an interview, design this, consult that - he’s had literal teams of people whose entire job was just to maintain his schedule.

But the whole point of his new direction is to cut off _everyone_ (minus Steve), and if he is really dedicating himself to this loner thing then he really shouldn’t have a schedule to keep, so he just shakes his head, and says, “No, thank you, I’ve decided to become a hermit for the next year or so. Salinger, like. Or John Hughes. Probably more John Hughes, as there’s less books and more weird shit lying around. I just assume John Hughes had a lot of shit, the whole hermit thing makes it hard to tell.”

Her hand is back on his arm, cradling his elbow, and he looks at her in mild surprise. “Mr. Stark, I’d really urge you to reconsider.”

“Jesus, are you trying to seduce me? Is this a honeypot mission or something?”

He mostly said it to embarrass her, and is caught off guard by the look of surprise that quickly crosses her face before she masks it.

“JARVIS, make a note to complain to Pepper about allowing people down here. It’s really hard to be a secluded recluse if she keeps making meetings for me.” He spins, her hand still on his elbow, and points her to the door. “Miss Rushman,” he says, and gives her a little push.

“Goodbye, Miss,” Steve says, with a little wave, and she gives Steve a curious look before she exits.

“Okay,” Tony says, spinning around to face Steve. “I think I was going to take you through 1990s music videos?”

* * *

They leave the tower for the first time about a month and a half in. Steve is careful to leave a big bowl of water and food for Roomba, even though they’re only planning on being gone for two days.

Tony is nervous.

He’s been avoiding going out for several reasons, and most of them point back somehow to his public image. He’s a recognizable guy, okay, it’s really hard to mask his face and looks so he’s not stopped on the street. He doesn’t want people crowding him and the paparazzi taking pictures and everyone pointing and staring because he’s been out-of-service for like two months and everyone seems to think he’s either dead or having a mental breakdown.

He also doesn’t want to ruin the time for Steve.

He suggests Steve go without him, but Steve just looks at him strangely and says, “But then what’s the _point,_ ” and Tony’s so speechlessly touched that he doesn’t say anything more to try to talk him out of it.

Steve had never left Brooklyn before the war, and in the war, he spent most of his time in France and Germany. He hasn’t seen much of the United States in the first place, so Tony has a hankering to show him some of the highlights. The Grand Canyon, Hawaii, Hollywood, Yellowstone, Disney World, Chicago – even some small-town shit, Lord knows that can be sort of interesting, like cool ice cream shops and run-down grocery stores.

He really, really doesn’t want to be noticed, but he really, really wants Steve to have a good time, so he finally lets Steve choose, and he’ll deal with the consequences.

To his utter surprise, Steve picks L.A.

“Isn’t that a little loud? Flashy?” Tony asks, as they’re preparing to go.

“It’s one of the biggest cities in America. If I want the real nowadays culture, shouldn’t that be my first stop?” Tony isn’t sure what to say, beyond, ‘if you go there you might not think humanity was worth saving anymore,’ but Steve continues. “Plus, I read that there’s so many celebrities there that most people ignore them on the street. Isn’t that what you want?”

Tony folds.

He also wears a hat, sunglasses, and purposefully dresses like a poor farmer.

Tony finds himself relaying a lot of anecdotes about the city. He almost surprises himself; he didn’t realize he had invested so much of himself in this place. It doesn’t really feel like home, it hasn’t for a little while, but there’s a history there that he wasn’t expecting.

He also wasn’t expecting Steve to _listen._

He’s halfway through a story about one time that he had accidentally dropped a multi-million-dollar prototype for a defense missile antenna and it had rolled under a dumpster. He’s most of the way through explaining how he tried not to sully his Armani suit while shimmying under a dumpster because he had a meeting in twenty minutes, when he pauses, because this story isn’t particularly interesting or flattering.

But Steve’s arm is around his shoulders – when did _that_ happen – and he pokes him on the shoulder with one of his fingers, and says, “Go on, I want to know what happened,” and _Oh,_ Tony thinks. _This is why people have friends._

* * *

“You seem to be doing better,” Tony says one morning as he’s making toast. He really should make a toaster where you can see how toasty your toast is getting while it is being toasted. Like glass. Or a projected image? Or maybe a video feed to the front of the toaster.

“Do I?” Steve asks, and it takes a moment for Tony to remember that he’s the one who started this conversation.

Tony turns, and Steve’s sitting at the table across from the counter, one hand on his phone, staring at Tony with a raised eyebrow.

Tony bets he’s been reading his news feed on his phone. He’s so proud.

“Yeah,” Tony says, turning back to the toaster. “You’re less sulky. Happier most days.”

“I guess, yeah,” Steve says shrugging. He pauses, looks like he’s contemplating it, then says, far more seriously, “Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Glad the trauma is starting to fade,” Tony says, like a jackass, and he silently winces at himself.

“It’s starting to feel real.”

“And it didn’t before?” The toast pops, and Tony grabs it a little too quickly as it burns his fingers.

“No. It felt like a dream. My therapist says it’s disassociation, where the brain can’t make sense of what its seeing, so it tries to create a barrier between what you think is real and what you are perceiving.” Tony turns, and Steve is frowning. “I think that’s what she said, anyway.”

“Hm.” Tony picks up an orange out of the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter. He juggles it once, twice, and then suddenly chucks it at Steve’s chest as hard and quick as he can.

Steve’s reflexively hits it away with his arm, then blinks.

“Excuse me?”

Tony grabs an apple and aims it right for Steve’s head, who again blocks it with ease.

“Tony—”

With a quick hand, Tony grabs the thick particle accelerator manual he’d been reading last night, then steps around the kitchen counter so he’s facing Steve. Leaning forward, he pokes him with the book.

“Uh—”

He pokes him harder, in the shoulder, the corner digging in, and Steve leans away.

“Tony, what are you doing?” He bats the book away, but Tony continues.

“Does that feel real? Does it?” He pokes him harder.

Steve grabs the book right of his hands, which, _rude,_ and slams it on the table. “Knock it off.”

“JARVIS,” Tony says, and Steve audibly sighs. “Turn on AC/DC. Any song. Loud.”

The music blares.

“LOUDER, JARVIS,” Tony yells.

Tony doesn’t skimp on his tech, so the bass is pounding. He can feel the reverberation in his skull, in his bones, in his fingers, in his heart. The room is shaking a little, and Steve goes to cover his ears. Tony grabs his hands away and pulls them down, and Steve lets him.

“THAT REAL, ROGERS?”

Steve is looking at him like he’s certifiably insane, but, after a moment of just bewildered staring, Steve smiles.

And then he laughs.

Tony can’t hear it, the music drowning it out, but he can see it. Steve shakes with it, his head pitching forward, his smile wide and eyes filled with mirth, and—

And Tony suddenly feels like he missed the last step when walking down stairs.

* * *

Tony had _finally_ fallen asleep. Granted, he was in the middle of a dream where he was back in Afghanistan and they injected him with liquid palladium, and he could feel it coursing through his veins, so it wasn’t like he was _married_ to the idea of being asleep, but no one really wants to wake up from a beeping security alarm.

“JARVIS,” Tony asks, flinging an arm over his eyes. “Cut the noise. What’s happening?”

“Sir, there’s—”

JARVIS is drowned out by a startlingly large noise, one that makes Tony legitimately sit up in surprise, one that would make him worry for his heart if it wasn’t already shredded. It sounds like someone threw a microwave through the wall.

“What in the goddamn fucking hell is all that—”

The wall explodes.

Tony’s flung back into his headboard, cracking his skull on the wood. He unthinkingly pulls the blanket over his head, trying to protect his face from the falling debris.

When the dust finally seems to settle for the moment, Tony throws the blanket off.

And there’s Steve, strutting through the hole in the wall with an expression on his face like he has only murder on his mind.

Tony’s honestly a little scared, ready to babble and beg for his life, when Steve goes down to one knee – and oh, Steve threw something through the wall.

Or, more accurately, some _one._

There’s a dude on the floor, currently in a supersoldier chokehold. His hair is black and tangled, there’s something slightly wrong with his lip, and he looks familiar in that weird way that Tony’s just _sure_ he’s supposed to know who this is.

“JARVIS, identify,” Tony says, scooching forward on the bed so he’s closer to the action. “Steve, maybe lighten the grip a little, there.”

“He came into my room and tried to kill me, monologuing about bringing about your downfall,” Steve snaps, and Tony can see his fingers tighten. “Don’t tell me to let him go.”

“I didn’t say let _go,_ I said maybe we want him to still have his larynx in case we have questions.”

“Sir,” JARVIS interrupts, but Tony can see Steve start to let go, though he keeps a firm grip on his neck, and his other hand goes to secure the man’s right hand, which was twitching. “I have identified him as Ivan Vanko, the son of a Russian physicist.”

“Huh.”

“I know him,” Steve says, and good God, does he sound pissed. Apparently sneaking up on Steve when he’s sleeping has devastating consequences; Tony should take note. “He’s been on TV talking down about you.”

“About me?” Tony gets off the bed, and stands next to where Vanko’s body is pinned. Steve doesn’t appear to be letting up. “Hey, you.” He kicks Vanko in the side. “Hey.” Another kick. “Hey. What do you have against me?”

“Your father ruined my father’s life!” Vanko manages out through Steve’s grip on his windpipe.

“Yeah, he did that a lot to a lot of people, you aren’t special. You need to be a little more specific,” Tony says, kicking him in the ribs again.

“They created the reactor _together,_ ” Vanko hisses, and oh, Tony actually might remember this guy for real. “And then he deported him—”

“For stealing his patents, that’s right, that’s right. You hate me, legacy, blah blah blah. Why come into my _house_ though?”

“I wanted to prove to the world that Iron Man is not invincible,” Vanko says. “You wouldn’t come out in public, though, so I had to come to you. I was looking for you but found—” His hand twitches, probably trying to point to Steve. “Killing you would be great - but what better way to show your vulnerability than to show you can’t protect those you love?”

“I’m sure you didn’t expect Steve to be Steve,” Tony says, with probably far too much glee in his voice. “God, I hope we never tell anyone who you really are, Steve, this surprised look of horror when you can crush steel with your fingertips is fantastic. Really, picture worthy. Though did you have to throw him through the wall? It’s a bitch to get contractors up this many floors.”

“He was monologuing about _killing_ you,” Steve says again, like somehow that’s worse than probably being awoken by some dude trying to murder him. Hell, it’s Steve, it may actually be.

“JARVIS!” Tony calls. “How did he get in, anyway?”

“He used the stairs, sir. It is a public building for the most part.”

“And for the private areas?”

“He cut through the door with an electrified whip, sir,” is JARVIS’s ever deadpan answer, and okay, fine, that’s a valid reason for their security protocols to have failed.

“Where is the whip now?”

“Captain Rogers broke it in half and threw it at Mr. Vanko’s head, sir. I believe it is currently wedged three feet deep into the south wall, underneath the painting of Venice.”

“Huh,” Tony says. “Do you think I could pass that off for modern art to Pepper?”

“Undoubtedly so, sir,” JARVIS answers.

“What do you want to do with him?” Steve asks. He’s still holding him down, and Tony wonders slightly if his hand is cramping.

He does realize for the first time that Steve’s in pajamas, blue and plaid ones, which just makes this whole thing so much better.

“JARVIS, alert the cops. Seems like an open and shut revenge plot soiled. I’m sure the property damage and embedded weapon and JARVIS’s recordings will be enough to convince them for breaking and entering and attempted murder charges.”

Steve’s grip tightens.

 

It doesn’t make the news.

It probably should, but Pepper’s a goddess.

She’s also a worrier. He’s grown to hate her visits because they constantly make him feel like a piece of shit.

She’s busy, so it only happens three times – but each time he gets blazingly drunk afterwards. She’s sweet, because she’s always sweet, but there’s such an undercurrent of worry there.

“Tony,” she says once. “It’s not that I’m not glad to see you out of the limelight. I’m just worried about you. This isn’t normal. All I want is for you to be okay.”

He sends her off with assurances that he has Steve and he’s still inventing and he’s doing _normal_ people stuff and honestly Pepper I love the downtime and no Pepper I’m not quitting being Iron Man I’m just taking a public break and goodness Pepper would you look at the time.

She also sends Rhodey to check on him, which is just fucking rude. Why does no one _listen to him_ when he says he’s fine, honestly.

Rhodey comes in at not the exact best moment, when he and Steve are having an argument about Vanko.

“Why don’t you want to look into who he is? He had arc reactor technology, if that gets out—”

Steve has been a broken record for the entire day, and Tony’s getting a wee-bit sick of it.

“He had only had that because he stole it from my dad. No one else has come up with it on their own.”

“He could have shared that information with other people!”

“Of course he didn’t, did he _look_ like a man who is all friendship-is-magic pony friends with other people?”

“What does that even mean?”

“That it’s fine, it’s over!”

“He could send someone else after you!”

“Who cares!” 

“You should! I do!” Steve says, his arms up in the air. “He tried to kill you!”

“Yeah, people do that. Blueberry?”

Steve glares at him, and ignores the carton Tony’s holding out, why is he so _rude,_ when Rhodey speaks up from behind them, where the elevator had opened completely unheard.

“I like this guy, who is this?”

Tony and Steve both whirl around, and Steve immediately goes into a defensive stance, which _no._

“Rhodey!” Tony jumps forward, vaulting the couch, and also spilling all the blueberries, to pull Rhodey into a hug. “Hey man. What are you doing here?”

“Just checking in,” he says, which means _Pepper sent me and I didn’t actually come just to say hi,_ Tony thinks darkly. “It’s good to see you, Tones.”

“You too, boo.” He keeps one arm around Rhodey’s shoulders and pulls him towards Steve, who has dropped his defensive stance and instead has taken to standing awkwardly like a giant lug.

“Rhodey, this is Steve. He’s a SHIELD agent who is staying with me for CLASSIFIED reasons. See, I can have classified projects too, it’s not just you, Mr. Airforce man.”

“I know, Tony,” Rhodey says, digging his elbow into his stomach. “Why on Earth anyone thought you’d be the best person to house someone is beyond me.”

“Hey,” Steve objects, which is lost in Tony’s much louder, “ _Hey.”_

Rhodey rolls his eyes.

“Hey, Rhodey, I’ve been meaning to ask, if you could have any of my houses, which would you take?”

“Why?”

“Curiosity? Chop chop, which one?”

“I don’t want any of your houses.”

“Fine. Cars? Which car?”

“I don’t want any of your cars.”

“Really? When did you turn Amish?”

Rhodey fixes him with a weird look. “Tony, are you feeling okay?”

“God, why do people keep _asking_ that?” Tony says. He hopes his collar covers the black crossword that is starting to take over his neck. “I’m perfectly normal.”

“Is he?” Rhodey asks Steve, who has just been standing and awkwardly leaning against the wall for the last few minutes of the interaction.

“Uh,” Steve says. “I guess he’s been normal for Tony?”

Rhodey laughs, and Tony scowls.

 

Steve hides out for most of Rhodey’s visit. It’s late – almost 1AM, when Rhodey skips out, and Tony finds himself alone in his workshop once again.

In a way, Rhodey was worse than Pepper.

At least Tony always knows what Pepper’s thinking.

Rhodey sees too much, and sees too quietly. He’s _looking_ and he’s interpreting and he just – he _knows_ too much about Tony to be led astray by any of Tony’s diversion tactics.

It’s a hard thing to deal with, being so utterly known. He feels exposed, like that outer-mask he never takes off is just invisible, like he’s wearing one less layer of clothes, and there’s nothing he can do to cover himself.

He spent the whole day actively trying to hide it – and now it’s all that’s on his mind.

“Hey JARVIS,” Tony says. “Open up project ‘Inevitable.’”

It’s been mostly abandoned since Steve came into his life. He’s been so enjoying _not_ thinking about it, and just living his life. He can’t imagine what he would have done if Steve hadn’t been there for him to throw his reckless hopelessness into. All that time, effort, and concentration that’s gone into keeping Steve distracted has had the wonderous effect of keeping Tony distracted.

He sighs, nice and long and unhappy, and scrolls down to number 18, “What to do with schematics for tech that hasn’t yet worked out?”

Roomba jumps up next to him, batting her head into his stomach, and Tony idly pets her head with one hand as he begins to type with his other.

  

The next morning is bad.

He’s sleep deprived and upset and he actually fell over when getting off his chair – and he doesn’t want this to be over, not _really,_ but he does want to stop _feeling_ so much, so he takes a bottle of whiskey, and bets himself that he can finish it before the sun rises.

He can, which still doesn’t feel like an accomplishment.

He misses breakfast, and before he knows it, Steve has come down the stairs looking for him. He’s glad he’s made it to the couch and off the floor, because that’s a pathetic he doesn’t really want to reach.

“Hey Tony,” he greets, apparently oblivious to the fact that Tony’s about three seconds and a good hard shove away from vomiting. “You didn’t come up to eat. Just wanted to check in.”

“You’ve done your duty, now,” Tony says, and something about his tone must tip Steve off, because Steve visibly reels back in surprise. “You can go.”

“Are you alright?”

“Peachy,” he answers, closing his eyes, and letting his head fall back onto the couch.

It takes a moment, but he can feel Steve settle on the couch next to him.

He’s silent.

The moments tick by, and eventually, Tony cracks open an eye.

Steve’s just sitting next to him, hands folded, staring off into space.

“You don’t have to stay here,” Tony says, closing his eye again. “You’ve more than done your civic duty keeping me company for a life-time. I think you’ve spent more time hanging out with me than anyone else in my life, probably. JARVIS, how much time have we spent together?”

“By only my observations, sir, it is more than 850 hours.”

“Jesus Christ, yeah, you’ve earned going away from me for a bit. It’s fine.”

“Tony,” Steve says, and what’s that tone, why does he sound confused. “You’re upset. Why would I leave you if you’re upset?”

“You’re not trying to comfort me,” Tony says, and goddamn it, that sounded like a condemnation.

“I don’t know the words,” Steve admits. “But I can just be here for you.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Steve repeats, like the question is baffling.

“Yeah, why do you care?”

“Because I care about you?” Steve answers, like it’s a question.

And fuck – this whole thing has maybe gotten out of hand.

Steve isn’t supposed to _care._ He’s supposed to _learn_ off Tony, and then be so righteously annoyed with him that when Tony dies he’s secretly a little relieved. What the hell.

He doesn’t want to be that self-pitying bastard that asks Steve why he cares about him, though he kind of wants to, just so he can stop doing whatever it is he’s doing right so Steve won’t get hurt at the end – but he’s also more of a selfish bastard than he likes to admit, and there’s a part of him, a real deep, important part of him, that enjoys having a friend.

Steve doesn’t know him like Pepper does, like Rhodey does. But sometimes Tony feels like the only reason they are there is because he grabbed them and refused to let go.

But Steve – Steve’s just a person who chose to be around Tony, and keeps choosing to be around Tony, and who, if given the choice, Tony would choose right back.

He doesn’t need to be known, maybe.

Maybe he needs to be existed with.

His eyes are starting to water, so he just reaches a hand up to them, presses down hard, and lets himself take comfort in Steve’s quiet presence, ignoring the swirling of his stomach.

There’s really no going back now.

* * *

The next few days gradually improve.

There’s a weird Coulson incident, which Tony mostly puts out of his mind by the time it’s over.

Tony’s waiting for Steve to finish with his morning workout – he wonders why Steve bothers, sometimes; the muscles survived inactivity for 70 years, does he _really_ need to work them out for two hours every goddamn morning – when Coulson knocks on the door of his workshop.

After a moment of deliberation, Tony lets him in, though he doesn’t lift his welding mask or drop the torch. If he gives him too much attention, Coulson will get _ideas_ about who Tony finds important.

“Agent! What do I owe the honor?”

Coulson doesn’t come much further into the room than two steps. “Tony,” he greets. “You’re making it hard to check up on you.”  


“Why would you need to check up on me?” Tony asks. He turns off the torch and places it on the table, where it rolls off and almost hits him in the foot. He jumps back, landing into his table, and he can see Coulson’s bland smile from behind the slotted eyes of the mask.

“Do the words ‘privatized world peace’ mean anything to you? You can’t declare yourself a savior and then disappear.”

“Why? Jesus did.”

“Tony.”

“I also seem to remember saying that Iron Man was my property and no one else could have it. And if I decide to put it out of public commission for a while, that’s my decision to make.”

“People wonder why.”

“People can stick their wonder up their ass.”

“Some people who are wondering aren’t only the public. People like Senators, the Secretary of Defense, and Director Fury.”

“Yeah, my answer sticks.”

The conversation devolves from there, and Tony makes sure to kick him out before Steve comes down.

* * *

It’s been well over two months by the time Tony realizes he may have a real, actual problem beyond the black one poisoning his veins.

He wakes up, thinks, _I wonder where Steve is._

He asks JARVIS, gets a confirmation of the gym, then thinks, _I wonder if I can make him new gym equipment._

He goes downstairs after eating a bagel, pats Roomba on the head, and starts creating a reinforced steel drone that dodges shots. He thinks, _I bet Steve will love this._

Steve asks him to come upstairs, and he does, immediately dropping the work, and settles on the couch next to him, where they begin a game of Call of Duty that Tony is definitely going to lose.

Tony thinks, _I bet I could code a game Steve would like more._

They talk through blowing shit up, and Tony tells Steve, almost unthinkingly, about his first girlfriend sleeping with him to steal Stark Industries proprietary information off his laptop when he was sleeping.

Steve tells him in return about his mother, and Tony thinks nothing of it.

Steve leaves to go to the bathroom, and Tony thinks, _I hope he gets back soon,_ and that’s when it hits him.

 _Ah, fuck,_ he thinks. _I’ve gone and got obsessed._

 

The problem is, Tony is a bit of a fixator. He gets a project and nothing else exists until he finishes, and he’s had that problem with people in the past as well. He latches on and suffocates them with his feelings until the person pushes him away, gasping for breath, and he loses another person.

It doesn’t happen all that often. It happened more when he was a kid and stupid, but there’s always one, inevitable result – the person gets tired of him.

His first response is, _Oh shit, I should back away._ His second, almost immediate response is, _Oh shit, I really don’t want to back away._

He’s latched on, like a lamprey or something equally suction-y and gross, and, when he bottom lines it for himself, he really doesn’t think he can let himself let go.

If Steve pries him off, that’s one thing.

But he’s running out of time, and this is _all he has._

And it’s more than that, if he takes a moment to be honest with himself, which he _despises_ doing. It has evolved from ‘let’s hang out because helping you gives me purpose’ to ‘let’s hang out because it’s all I have to do’ to ‘let’s hang out because it’s the best part of my day’ to ‘let’s hang out because you’re my favorite part of life,’ and God knows Tony doesn’t want it to evolve from there, though it most definitely will if he’s not careful.

Steve comes back from the bathroom and settles back down onto the couch. He gives Tony a smile, and says, “Start again?”

And Tony just thinks, _I’ve never been one for careful anyway._

* * *

In a moment of self-loathing, Tony tells Steve that Steve should get more friends.

Steve looks hurt, and says something akin to, “I’ve never had more than one friend at a time,” and the only honest response Tony has is, “Yeah, me neither, and maybe that’s a problem.”

Steve joins a book club at the local library. It helps him catch up on what he missed, and the other members are his contemporizes in age. Technically.

Tony tries to join a tech club at a neighboring college but ends up kind of commandeering the entire meeting and spends the entire night afterwards feeling guilty.

He goes back anyway.

Steve also volunteers at the local VA and an animal shelter, because of course he does.

When Tony asks him if he’s made more friends, Steve shrugs, and says, “Yeah. People to go to breakfast with anyway.”

“Do you want to go to the aquarium with one of them instead?” Tony asks, ‘cause he’s really trying with this friendship thing, and sometimes that means _trying_ to not cling.   

Steve just looks at him like he’s dumb, which isn’t a look Tony’s all that accustomed to seeing, and says, “Of course not. They’re not you.”

Tony’s not usually people’s first choice. Except for actual People magazine, he’s been their first choice like seven times. But real people, for friendship? No.

It’s disconcerting and makes him breathe a little funny, but he just says, “How flattering, I’ll be sure to write that in my Strawberry Shortcake Diary,” even though it’s a moment he’s probably not going to ever forget.

* * *

Tony is almost finished with the roaming drone design. He actually thinks he may be able to sell it commercially and makes an actual note to JARVIS to tell Pepper about it. He’s missed inventing more than he wants to admit to himself – there’s something just so _pleasing_ about something coming together, and he almost wishes he could just do another one of his 72 hour binge designs again, though he really thinks it would actually kill him nowadays.

Steve’s down there with him, looking at the simulations and giving pointers. Tony’s been taking footage of him training in the gym and using that as his prediction algorithm, but it doesn’t hurt to have an untrained eye.

They’re both startled when the door opens.

“You.” Tony snaps his fingers a few times. “You. You. Natasha. Natalia?”

“Natalie,” she corrects with a not-very-polite grimace. “I’m Miss Potts’s personal assistant.”

“Didn’t you apply to be mine?”

“Yes, but when you declined the offer, she decided to hire me on for herself.”

“Good for her,” Tony says, and means it. “She always had a good eye.”

He winks, and she smiles blandly at him. “Actually, Mr. Stark, if I could come in—”

“Nope,” he says. “Have her email whatever it is to me,” and then shuts the door in her face and locks it with a technology so complicated it hasn’t even been featured in Star Trek.

“God, Steve,” Tony says, turning back to the table. “People treat this place as a train station. Her, Coulson, Rhodey, Pepper. It’s ridiculous.”

“Actually, Tony, speaking of Coulson,” Steve says. His hands are fiddling with each other a little, and Tony looks over.

“Eh?” he prompts.

“Coulson was over here a few weeks ago,” Steve says like a confession.

“I know,” Tony says slowly. “He stopped by to see me.”

“He actually stopped by to see _me,”_ Steve says, and Tony takes his hand off the mouse, and gives Steve his full attention.

“Why?”

“SHEILD offered me a job.”

“Doing what?”

“At the moment, watching you.”

Steve’s carefully gauging Tony’s reaction, Tony can tell, but Tony can’t really see the problem.

“Okay?” He scratches his head.  “Did you take it? I hope you took it. You could take their money for slipping them false secrets about me. Like I drink orange juice daily or am planning to bomb Russia or I painted the Iron Man suit green for Earth Day, or something.”

“I don’t want money,” Steve says, actually affronted. “And I don’t want to lie.”

“Then you turned them down?”

“I thought about it, but yes, I turned them down.”

“Okay.” Steve’s still watching him like he’s waiting for something, and Tony’s feeling dizzy and not up for following this conversation, so he just says, “I’m sorry, what’s the issue?”

“I thought you’d be upset.”

“At what, that SHIELD wants eyes on me? They’ve had eyes on me since before Afghanistan, and definitely after. It’s no surprise. I’m more surprised with my disappearance they haven’t had some agent come and try to infiltrate my lab to watch me. I mean, other than you.”

“I don’t know,” Steve says, looking down, and Tony finds himself watching, tapping his fingers on the table. “I just thought you might be upset I didn’t tell you.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything, Steve,” Tony says. “Though I probably would have been pissed if you took the job and didn’t tell me, that’s a no-no when it comes to roommates.”

“I have been thinking lately that maybe I should look at getting a job,” Steve says, and Tony moves to shut down the computer – this is probably going to be a long conversation. He leans back in his chair, spinning slightly, and gives his full attention over.

“What kind? Retail? Cashiering? Biking to stop cancer?”

“No. I’m not sure. Maybe SHIELD, as an agent. I can see the appeal of active duty again, with a team who knows who I am and what I can do. But it seems too—”

“Too war-like?” Tony suggests.

“Too shady,” Steve completes. “I want to know what I’m fighting against at all times. I’m not good at taking blind orders.”

“You don’t have to go back into something military, you know. I mean, really. Do you always have to fight against the bad? Can’t you contribute to the good?”

“Like you?” Steve questions, absolutely genuinely, and then shakes his head. He moves right along, not even noticing that something about the nonchalant way he said that takes Tony’s brain momentarily offline. “I just don’t think that’s me.”

“You could become a fireman,” Tony suggests, ignoring the way the compliment made his insides squirm slightly. He sits up tall, spinning the chair. “Save kittens, run into danger head first. Etc. And so on.”

“I don’t think there’s enough fires to keep me interested for long,” Steve says, mouth twitching.

“I could set some for you,” Tony proposes, and Steve laughs. “Hey, I’m serious, I’m great at setting fires, on purpose and on accident, just ask DUM-E or U or most of the Middle East, it’s my—”

“Sir,” JARVIS interrupts. “There’s an incoming threat.”

“What?” Tony demands, immediately standing. Steve’s out of his chair in a millisecond and heading out, presumably to get his shield. “What’s going on?”

“May I suggest I brief you in the armor, sir?” JARVIS says.

Tony looks over to where it’s standing.

The suits are still his magnum opus, even if he hasn’t touched them in months. He doesn’t know why, exactly – he can say he’s been distracted by Steve, and yeah, maybe, but it’s a lie to say that’s all it is. It’s more than that, like he’s afraid the poison in him will also infect them. That he’ll use all that power for something he shouldn’t.

For the first time, he had wondered if he deserved to take that position of power for himself.

“Sir?” JARVIS prompts.

“Yeah, JARVIS,” Tony says, because when it comes down to it, the armor isn’t about power or style or authority – it’s about protection. “I’m going.”

 


	4. Chapter 4

By the time Steve gets to his shield, JARVIS is telling him to go up to the roof instead of back down to Tony’s workshop.

He does, racing down the corridors, flinging himself around corners at JARVIS’s direction, and up he goes and –

“Holyyyyy shit,” Tony’s voice rings out, loud and modulated. He’s in the armor, flying a few feet above the rooftop, and Steve spends a second being stunned to see it finally in action – God, it’s beautiful, it looks like something off a movie screen – before he takes notice of the dozens upon dozens of poorly reconstructed iron man suit drones surrounding the tower, shooting beams of blue light through the windows.

People are screaming from down on the street, glass is shattering, and all Steve can do is stare at the armor – at Tony – and feel helpless.

This is his first battle since WWII, and he’s frozen.

“Steve!” Tony barks, and Steve flinches, looking back up at him. “We need to take these things down. Now.”

Tony shoots one of his repuslors straight at one, and it explodes into a thousand pieces, littering mechanical pieces all over the rooftop.

And suddenly, Steve realizes, he knows how to do this.

He springs into action, running towards an end of the roof, building up momentum, and chucks his shield at one passing overhead. It hits its target, and the drone falls like a brick. Steve runs after it, grabbing the shield out of its broken body with a metal screech, and throws it at another.

Tony’s next to him, shooting and blasting, and mechanized parts keep raining down over him. He’s getting scraped and bruised and he hasn’t felt this type of focused adrenaline since shooting at someone with a swastika armband.

“Why are they attacking at the roof?” Tony asks. He spins, a beam of light going straight through another. “What is their aim? Why not target the workshop?”

“Good question,” Steve says, his fist flying through another.

He stops.

He’s good at this – or, he used to be good at this.

Tactics.

Focus through the chaos. Observe. Draw conclusions.

The drones aren’t really attacking anything in particular – instead, they seem to be mostly surveying with their cameras at the front.

 _Cameras_ , Steve thinks. _They’re looking for something in particular._

When they’re attacked, they attack back, but they aren’t targeting, not yet, nothing beyond windows. 

“Hey, Steve, think you can hold them off for a second? I want to get out of the suit and see if one I just blew still has its computer in it. If I can get a look at its code, I might be able to figure out where the hell they came from and what the hell they’re doing.”

“Sure, Tony,” Steve agrees automatically.

He throws his shield at another, making sure the angle is right that it will ricochet back instead of go flying off the building.

There’s a mechanized noise, which Steve idly catalogues as Tony stepping out of the armor.

Then? Pandemonium.

They all immediately turn, facing Tony, and they rise up like a swarm of bees, and Steve can hear their guns starting to go.

“Tony!” He yells. “Back in the suit, back in the _suit!”_

He can hear Tony squeak something in reply, but he’s not paying attention, too focused on getting between the drone’s fire and Tony’s unprotected body.

He throws the shield, hitting three at once, and there’s Iron Man again, flying around and around and around, and all the drones follow.

“They must have been looking for me,” Tony says. “But couldn’t identify me through the suit. Now that they know—oh, shit, one second.”

Steve stops, watching helplessly as Tony flies up and up and up, the drones a swarm behind him, maybe forty, maybe more.

Tony gets high, high enough that they’re specks, and suddenly everything is falling – everything, all the drones, like lead weight, and the Iron Man armor, going down, down, down.

“Tony!” Steve yells again.

He watches, helpless, as the armor drops. There’s no response, though Steve’s sure he wouldn’t be able to hear one anyway.

Tony’s going to hit the roof, going fast and going hard, and he’s definitely going to break something – maybe his neck, even.

Steve looks around wildly, hoping for something to help ease the fall.

 _Like what?_ A little voice at the back of his head says. _Like a net? A mattress? On a rooftop? You’re a moron._

Pushing it away, Steve makes a split-second decision, and stands right underneath the falling armor.

 _This is going to hurt,_ he thinks, three seconds before Tony falls right into him, and yes, that really hurt.

 

The wind is knocked out of him, that’s for sure, and he definitely cracked at least half of his ribs, though he can already feel them healing. He hopes his head didn’t crack too hard on the concrete, though, honestly, he may have blacked out for a second, and he’s not really sure.

He can hear the armor disassembling, and then it’s being pushed off him, and he hears a very anxious, “Steve?”

“Ugh,” he says, blinking hard. And oh, there’s Tony. He’s the anxious one. “You okay?”

“Am _I_ okay?” Tony repeats in disbelief. “You just tried to catch the Iron Man armor falling at like, forty miles an hour, you idiot! Are _you_ okay?”

“I had to catch you, Tony,” Steve says. He tries to sit up. Tony immediately moves forward, hand on his back, trying to guide him. His arms hurt, ouch. “You would have hit the ground otherwise.”

“Yeah, and broken like, four ribs and maybe got a concussion. I got JARVIS to run the numbers, I would have been fine. What were you thinking, trying to catch me?”

“You did that on _purpose?”_ Steve asks, and given Tony’s wince, that might have been a shriek. “ _Why?"_

“It was an EMP blast. Everything tech stops working within 100 feet. Most efficient way to ground them all, even if it had to ground me too. They would break on crashing, I wouldn’t. Or mostly wouldn’t,” Tony amends. “It’s fine.”

“That seems like an unnecessary risk,” Steve objects, and Tony rolls his eyes.

“It worked. Why does everyone criticize plans that work? I did fine.”

He moves away from Steve and towards one of the drones.

“Let’s find out what this was about.”

* * *

About two hours of Tony typing into a computer and doing something complicated with wires, he spits out a very angry, “Fucking Hammer.”

Steve’s eyebrows climb. “Come again?”

“Come on, let’s get in the car. I’ll explain on the way.”

* * *

Steve hasn’t felt this much restlessness before a mission since rescuing Bucky from Hydra.

He gets a little intense about people he loves, he knows that, and this isn’t the first time that’s manifested around Tony.

He’s kind of glad he is still capable of caring about someone that much – some part of him sort of worried that the part of him capable of giving a shit died right along with him in the 1940s – but he hasn’t really missed the anxious, unrelenting anger that comes with it.

It doesn’t help that Tony is a public figure who is constantly harassed and – thanks to Iron Man – apparently often in mortal danger.

Tony doesn’t seem horribly concerned that there was just an assassination attempt on his life – or, at least, if he is, he isn’t showing it. He’s just sitting in the driver’s seat, although JARVIS is actually driving, with the seat all the way back and his feet up on the dashboard, humming some rock song.

It didn’t take long for Tony to explain what was going on - though explain was most likely an overstatement. Tony had said, “Hammer owns a rival tech company and he’s had a vendetta against me for a while, especially recently given I embarrassed his skinny ass in front of most of the US legislature. This was a remarkably unclassy way to try to take me out. He probably just wanted it public. Whatever. Dumbass tweeted an hour ago, was able to trace the location. He’s in one of his tech development facilities that is technically supposed to be in Cuba. Again, dumbass.”

Steve had wanted to talk about a lot more than that – why does he hate you, when did that start, did he ever make an attempt on your life before, how were you able to tell it was Hammer in the first place, do you have proof we can take to the police, is tracing him legal, where is he in the building, what’s the plan when we get in there, did you hurt anything when you fell, why are you acting like it doesn’t matter than you almost died – but Tony had put up a hand almost immediately, said that he had to make some calls, and then spent a half hour talking with Pepper about damage control around the tower. It sounded like they have to make a public statement about it, someone had to pay for the tower’s clean up, media outlets wanted proof that Tony didn’t die with the fall – and other boring, necessary stuff that had Steve sighing to himself and toning out Tony’s voice.

Instead, he occupied himself with creating scenarios in his head of how this confrontation would go down. They’d inevitably be completely inaccurate, but he did get an almost visceral satisfaction out of imagining breaking Hammer’s arm with just a turn of his wrist.

He should probably work on his worrisome tendency towards sadism.

The car stops in front of a non-descript warehouse-looking building out in the outskirts of Greenwich village.

“Come on,” Tony says, gesturing towards the door. Steve follows him out and waits the few seconds for the Iron Man armor to assemble.

“What’s the plan?” Steve asks. He looks over at the building. It’s surrounded by a chainlinked fence. Two doors, one on the right, one in the middle. The middle is padlocked, the right one looks open and has stairs leading to it. There appears to be a basement on the building. There’s probably rooftop access to the back left.

“Kick his ass,” Tony replies.

“Okay, but that’s not a plan—Tony!” Steve exclaims, watching in dull horror as Tony blasts through the fence with a repulsor. “You shouldn’t give away our position!”

“I don’t do subtlety, Cap.”

“Flashy and loud isn’t—”

“Let’s go this way,” Tony interrupts, and starts stalking towards the right hand door. Steve feels a spike of real irritation that he didn’t expect, and finds himself grabbing Tony’s arm and yanking him back towards him. Tony stumbles backwards, and Steve starts pulling him to the left.

“If there’s anyone else other than Hammer here, like employees, the front doors will lead straight to them. You mentioned that Hammer was controlling the drones remotely. If he’s still here, he was probably doing it from a lab, and not from an office where people could overlook. Our best bet for not being noticed and finding him is to go straight to the basement and work our way up.”

Tony’s standing still, and Steve can’t tell his expression through the helmet.

“What if I said we were going to fly to the roof?”

“Then you go ahead and fly to the roof,” Steve says, trying not to let his irritation seep through. “I will be going to the basement.”

“Wow,” Tony says after a drawn moment. “Don’t like being told what to do, eh.”

They’re wasting time for no reason.

“Come on,” Steve says, gesturing to their left.

Tony shakes his head, probably in exasperation, but he follows.

As Steve expected, they find a window to the basement around the next wall. Steve pulls the metal bars out to Tony’s silence, and kicks the glass through, shattering it, and they both fold their way down into the building.

The walls are all concrete, and as Steve finds out due to Tony’s muttered swearing, the tracker signal is lost.

They walk their way through the winding hallways, Tony’s heavy footsteps echoing far louder than Steve would like. His shield is at his side, ready, but they don’t run into a single person through the halls. There’s several rooms they bust open – an empty lab for biology experiments, what looks like a bedroom, and a broom closet.

He can almost _feel_ Tony’s dwindling patience next to him, and lets out a breath of relief when they finally stumble upon a door with light shining under it.

The door has a window, and Steve signals at Tony to step out of the way of it. Carefully out of sight from the inside, he makes his way forward, crouching, before he stands slightly, just enough to peer inside.

There’s a man inside – Steve is about 85% sure it is Hammer given what he remembers from the news – and he’s waving his hands around, yelling about something into a phone.

He’s alone.

Steve gives a nod to Tony, who aims his repulsor at the door lock, and Steve vaguely hopes he can keep this to a simple assault and not 1st degree premeditated murder. Hammer deserves a long and unhealthy jail sentence.

The lock to the door blasts off, and Steve’s immediately pushing through at run, cataloging how Hammer whirls around and his phone goes flying. Tony flies in behind him, landing about three feet in front of Hammer, one knee and his fist to the ground. Steve just _knows_ he chose that pose because it looks cool.

Tony stands. The armor creaks slightly, then the shoulders open up, revealing missile launchers, both aimed at Hammer. Steve steps in front of Tony, shield at the ready, and they both stare at Hammer, who’s hands are now up in a surrender mode.

“Oh hey, Justin,” Tony says conversationally. “I see you’ve been busy since the Congressional meeting.”

Whether he’s talking about the drones or the mountains of shit piled in the room, including what appears to be a half finished model of a knock off Iron Man armor hanging in the corner, Steve doesn’t know. And doesn’t care, as he feels a new sense of rage flow through him.

“Tony!” Hammer says. He doesn’t sound _near_ scared enough. “Let’s not get hasty, here.”

“Actually, I am all for getting hasty. Hasty is my middle name, right next to ‘righteously pissed.’ My third and fourth middle names. How are you feeling, Steve?”

“Not much like talking,” Steve says, advancing on Hammer, who turns to keep them both in his line of sight.

“Hey hey hey,” he says. “I just heard on the news about the drone attack on the tower. I’m so relieved you’re okay, Tony.”

“Cut the bullshit. I hacked the drones in half a minute and they instantly led me back to you. They had direct coding to go to the tower, shoot at the windows, and then target and kill anyone with my facial pattern? You incompetent idiot? Did you really think I wouldn’t be able to figure it out?”

“Oh Tony,” Hammer says. “That was certainly not me. Definitely one of my employees. I’ll be sure to investigate the situation and get to the bottom of it.”

“The only thing that was even slightly impressive was the arc technology in the drones. And that wasn’t even you, was it? It was Vanko’s technology. I recognized it from the schematics I was given after he was arrested.”

Hammer’s placid smile drops. “The arc technology powered the drones, that’s all. It had the smallest role of anything. It wasn’t the most impressive part.”

And praise be the Lord, this man was basically saying ‘Here are my buttons. Please push them.’

“The drones looked like throw away schematics of the Mark II,” Steve inputs. Tony’s faceplate snaps over to him, but he’s watching Hammer’s scowl deepen, and he feels a righteous bit of satisfaction. “Maybe a couple of years ago that would have been state of the art, but it just seems behind the times now.”

“The coding _alone_ was months of work,” Hammer says, pissed, then hastily corrects, “Was probably months.”

“How did _that_ take you months? Facebook algorithims are faster at facial recognition. And you really couldn’t figure out how to make it identify the Iron Man armor without me getting out?”

“The drones were modeled after the armor, they would shoot each other,” Hammer interrupts, angry and twitching. “It had to be your face.”

“I still wonder about the reactor,” Steve says. With Iron Man’s cameras, they probably already have enough to put him away on attempted murder charges, but adding conspiring with a known criminal couldn’t hurt. “Did you just steal Vanko’s designs?”

“If I talked with Vanko – which I did not – I would assume he wouldn’t care about a shorter sentence. He probably would just need the guarantee that Stark here would be dead.”

“Aw, paid off so easily, like a newsie,” Tony quips. “Do you like prison, Hammer? Because it likes you. It’ll be a nice, thirty, forty-year marriage.”

Hammer has been slowly and quietly inching backwards, which Steve has not missed. He assumed it was out of fear, but at the last moment, he can see Hammer’s hand settle on some device behind him on a table, and Steve just has the time to yell, _“Tony, move!”_ and fall to the ground before Hammer is pointing and shooting.

It appears to be a weapon powered by the arc reactor technology, and it shoots a repulsor beam straight at Tony, who manages to dodge out of the way by a hair.

Steve, heart pumping, had reflexively thrown the shield during his fall, aimed directly at Hammer’s hand.

It makes direct contact, and the crunch of the bones echos in the room, drowned out by Hammer’s scream of agony. The weapon drops to the ground, and Hammer drops to his knees

“Jesus fucking Christ, you have fast reflexes,” Tony says. He has one knee on the ground, but he stands without trouble, doing a visible body shake.

Steve stands, and they both advance towards Hammer, who is clutching his hand to his chest.

“Fuck you, Stark,” Hammer says, which, come on, _Steve_ was the one who broke his hand. He doesn’t even get a nod of recognition. Hammer lifts his head, and his eyes are glistening. “No one was supposed to be able to hack those, Stark. No one. No one else in the world could have. If they had just done their _job—”_

“See, Hammer, this is why you don’t even crack to Fortune 300. You’re short sighted. I consider that a personality defect.”

“Short sighted?” Hammer repeats, chest heaving. From pain or anger, Steve doesn’t know. “Short _sighted?_ I was trying to get rid of _you,_ how is that short sighted? No one else in the world has the balls to just do what has to be done for the best of everyone. I worked my entire _life_ to get to where I am, and then you come along and suddenly – what, I’m bumped off Time’s list of best tech conglomerates in the world, just like that?”

“Aw, that must have been traumatic for you,” Steve says.

“Everyone underestimates me!”

“Given the drone performance I just saw, I really don’t think it is possible to underestimate you,” Tony says.

“You don’t _deserve_ Stark Industries!” Hammer cries. “Your father made it what it was – a successful weapons company, and then you just decide on a _whim_ to make it a tech company, _stealing_ all my customers. And for what? Because you _can!_ You didn’t give a shit about tech before Afghanistan. You _ruin_ my business over an impulse? And you act like you’re God’s gift to tech, like no one else could do it!”

“These are a lot of declarative sentences,” Tony says, crossing his arms. “Not a lot of them are actually accurate.”

“You’re not special, Stark!” Hammer yells, pointing at him a little wildly with his good hand. “Give me a month more, and I would be able to upstage you, you narcissistic, gaudy, irredeemable—”

Steve’s fist connects with Hammer’s face, and Hammer falls to the ground, about as conscious as a couch.

“Oh,” Tony says, his voice distorted by the suit. The shoulder missiles power down. “You beat me to it.”

“Sorry,” Steve says, not at all repentant. “He wouldn’t shut the hell up.”

The mask retracts, and there’s Tony, and to Steve’s mild surprise, with a large smile on his face.

Tony crouches down next to the unconscious Hammer. “Oh my God, you broke his jaw too.”

“Oops,” Steve says, utterly deadpan.

Steve looks around the room. No one’s there, but that’s probably not going to last.

“Come on,” Tony says, “help me tie him up.”

They tie him to a support pole with some wire on a table and a complicated knot that Steve can’t even begin to follow.

“Done calling the police?” Tony asks, standing up from his crouch. Hammer’s hands and feet are also tied now, probably tighter than necessary.

“SHIELD is on its way.”

“Okay, well, that works too. I hope he’s actually put away. They’ll probably convict him given my shoulder cam footage, but God knows in this day and age. I’d love to never have to see his mug at a gala ever again.”

Steve is privately very sure that Hammer will be lucky to see the light of another day, but that’s mostly because he has the ear of Coulson, and despite what Phil says, he’s inordinately fond of Tony, and SHIELD is very good at making unpleasant things disappear.

“We should go,” Steve says, motioning towards the door. “SHIELD wants us gone before they get here, given the whole breaking and entering part.”

“Uh huh,” Tony responds, distracted. He’s heading towards a table towards the back of the room, covered in boxes. Steve follows him back.

The boxes have a lot of nonsense in them. Spare parts, little parts, pieces of technology that look useless.

Two boxes, however, seem to have something complete in them, and Tony’s standing over them, staring.

“What are those?” Steve asks, coming closer. They’re circles, glowing a dull blue, and, honestly, they look like an off-brand version of the reactor.

“I don’t know.” Tony picks one up and inspects it closer. “It’s a power source of some sort. I would guess it was Vanko’s duplication of the arc reactor. But it…it looks different than the others. This must have been a prototype, trying to get closer to the real one.”

“Did they?” Tony shoots him an offended look, and Steve puts up his hands. “Okay, sorry, dumb question. But what is it?”

“I…I don’t know. At the moment. JARVIS doesn’t recognize it.”

There’s something off with Tony’s tone, but Steve can’t place it. Though it doesn’t seem quite right, he’s fairly certain it’s probably just curiosity. There doesn’t seem to be a single mystery on this planet that Tony isn’t interested in.

And Steve would normally put it out of mind – but Tony’s off the rest of the ride back to the tower.

It’s nothing big. He answers right, has the right quips, does all the normal stuff. Steve wouldn’t even notice anything was off if he didn’t know Tony so well, if he wasn’t completely attuned to Tony, having subconsciously catalogued his version of normal every day, every hour, for the past months.

And something’s telling him that something is off. He’s too - quiet. He talks the same amount, but there’s something phoned in about it, like his mind is elsewhere. Which isn’t actually abnormal for Tony, but it’s the type of distracted. Like he doesn’t want to be distracted, like he has to guard himself from his own thoughts.

Or Steve’s insane. Tony certainly seems to think so, given the look he had shot Steve the third time Steve asked if he was okay.

The moment they park, Tony heads down to his workshop with a quick mention that there’s no need for Steve to follow him, he has something to do tonight.

Steve frowns his way through making dinner, and only realizes hours later that Tony had clutched that weird power source in his lap the entire ride back to the tower.

* * *

It’s almost five hours later when Tony comes back up.

He heads straight to the kitchen, which isn’t abnormal, given the lab time. But Steve looks over his shoulder on reflex, glancing at Tony digging in the fridge - and it’s just obvious there’s something wrong. The way he’s holding himself, it just doesn’t look right.

“Hey Tony,” Steve greets, trying to regulate his voice. Tony grunts a “hey,” that at least sounds okay, and manages a small hand wave, even with his head still stuck in the fridge.

It’s silent as Tony warms up some left-over food.

He comes over to the table and sits down. Steve idly moves his book to make more room for him.

“You doing okay?” Steve asks, as lightly as he can manage. Too serious, and Tony’s walls will slam down.

“Fine, Cap. Just had a disappointing lab session. Nothing unexpected.”

“But still disappointing?” Steve says sympathetically.

Tony shrugs in agreement.

“Did it have anything to do with that power source?”

Tony tenses momentarily, and then stuffs his mouth with a lot of noodles. When he swallows, it honestly looks like it hurts. “Yeah,” he confirms. “Was checking to see what it was made out of, what it could do. Turns out it was a combination of - well, it doesn’t matter. Known elements. Nothing revolutionary. I can’t do anything with it.”

“Could you do anything with it even if it was?” Steve asks out of sheer curiosity. “I mean, it’s patented to Hammer, right?” It’s odd - Steve never would have thought Tony would consider intellectual property theft.

Tony just says, “I was just curious.”

“Okay, sure.”

It’s silent for a minute or two, long enough for Steve to pick up his book again, and get a sentence or two in.

“It’s just—” Tony says. He’s staring down into his noodles. “You ever accept something as fact? So you grow used to it, and it’s fine? Not fine, but fine? But then something changes and you realize you really, really _don’t_ want it to be that way, but it’s still fact, and you can’t change it?”

“Uh,” Steve says eloquently.

“And it’s frustrating and disappointing and sometimes you think you can change the facts but you just, no matter what you do, how badly you decide you want it, despite not even caring all that much before, even thinking you deserved it before, you want it _so badly_ not to be fact. But what you want doesn’t matter, you know?”

“I, uh, guess—”

“This is stupid,” Tony snaps, effectively cutting off whatever Steve was about to say. Steve is actually a bit relieved. “I’m talking nonsense. JARVIS, turn the TV on. I don’t care what station.”

The TV flips on to something that’s on a commercial break, and Tony goes back to determinedly eating his noodles.

Steve doesn’t know how to do this. Something’s wrong, that much is obvious, but how he’s supposed to subtly needle Tony into opening up is a job far beyond his pay grade. Lord, he’d like to - but what is he supposed to say?

“Tony, are you okay?”

Probably not that, if Tony’s glare is any indication.

“I’m fine. JARVIS, unmute.”

The TV blares, way too loud. It’s talking about Oreos for around three seconds, before it switches to a trailer for a new season of a TV show that Tony has talked about getting Steve into for ages. They both watch the trailer in silence. Steve can sense Tony’s rapidly tapping fingers next to him, but resists the urge to cover his hand with his own to still them.

The TV loudly proclaims “COMING IN FALL 2011” when Tony drops his fork into his food, and covers his eyes with his hands.

“Tony?”

“I don’t think I can handle this right now.”

And whoa, those words in that order is not right coming out of Tony’s mouth.

“JARVIS, turn the TV off.”

The room is back in silence.

Steve gets off his chair and kneels beside Tony, carefully pulling his hands away from his eyes. To his astonishment, they are noticeably wet.

“Tony, what’s wrong?”

“I couldn’t explain the half of it,” he says. His tone has been noticeably tight since he came up, but this is the first time it wavers in some emotion - sadness, frustration, Steve can’t name it.

“Do you want to try?”

They’re close to each other - less than a foot, and Steve is struck, not for the first time, by how familiar Tony’s eyes are. There’s so much behind them, so unhappy, and Steve wishes he could just grab and just - just hold on.

Tony puts a hand over his eyes.

“Can you not be nice? It makes this worse.”

“How does it—” Steve stops suddenly, and looks around Tony’s arm. “Tony, is there something black on your neck?”

Tony’s hands slam on the table with a bang, and Steve jumps back.

“I can’t handle this right now.”

He stands and stalks out, taking the elevator down instead of up, and Steve’s left on the floor, feeling like he’s been left in more than one piece.

 

It takes him an hour, but he decides to check in on Tony.

Tony probably doesn’t want him to, but honestly, he doesn’t care. Tony makes it almost impossible to care for him - he gives everything and refuses to accept anything, and it’s honestly more emotionally taxing than if he leaned his whole life on Steve’s shoulders. Steve’s always been a giver, a fixer. And he knows Tony is too, but Steve doesn’t - or hopes he doesn’t - shy away from needing someone quite like Tony does. He knows it’s not intentional, but it makes him feel disposable, unimportant. Like he truly is just a roommate, someone Tony is putting up with just to be a nice guy.  

Tony is, bar none and with no competition, the most important person in his life. He thinks it’s probably fair that he wants, possibly desperately, to be important to Tony too - but he’s never going to be if he doesn’t force himself in, it seems. Stick his foot in the door and not leave until his foot is chopped off by it slamming shut or Tony opens it wider.

So, with a deep breath and an incredible amount of apprehension for someone who used to be a soldier, he heads through the workshop.

He hasn’t been locked out, which he appreciates, though he knows it was JARVIS’s doing and not Tony’s. He’s not sure what to think that he deduces that from a “Welcome, Captain,” from JARVIS. He thinks it makes him warm, but maybe a little embarrassed as well.

He’s invested so much of himself into understanding this little world.

He finds Tony, thankfully, in the back near the kitchen, curled up on a couch.

Less thankfully, he seems to be well on his way to truly sloshed.

“Hey Cap,” he greets with a lazy salute.

“Tony,” Steve says, trying to stay amicable. “What have you been up to the past hour?”

“I finished it,” Tony says. His drunken grin has the edge of something wrong with it. Steve’s never really been a heavy drinker, but he grew up in an Irish community right after prohibition, he’s seen heavy drinkers, and he knows some become far happier, almost giddy, more exuberant versions of themselves, while others turn sad, and dark, like something is closing in on them.

There’s something about that smile that really makes Steve think he’s in the latter category. He remembers all those articles he read about Tony’s challenges with alcohol, and suddenly, he feels a spike of concern, of wanting to change days that are already past that hits him stronger than anything has in a long while.

“Finished what?” Steve asks cautiously, folding himself down on the couch across from Tony.

“The list. Crossed out number 163 just a few minutes ago. Everything is taken care of. I should really thank you, you answered several of the harder questions. Like numbers 1 and 5. Easier when there’s a backup superhero. It was gonna be Rhodey. Gonna be a new one, even. But now there’s you, and he doesn’t need that on his shoulders. I gave him my villa in Italy instead. And a design of a specialized car, if I ever finish it.”

“Tony,” Steve says carefully. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No?” His tone turns to the self-loathing. “You never seem to. I try, but it’s not good enough. I can never seem to be good enough. I—You know I have always been like this?” Tony picks up a screwdriver that’s poking up between the couch cushion, spins it between his fingers, and then chucks it across the room. It seems to collide with a toolbox, but Steve doesn’t turn to look.

“I have always been terrible at making people feel the right things. My mom used to say that being smart comes at a price, and a lot of smart people are bad at people - but it’s not fair. I’m good enough for the public, and the press. But whenever it comes to something I care about, something that takes more than just smarm - I just inevitably fuck it up.”

“I don’t think you’ve fucked up with me,” Steve says carefully. It’s almost ironic, Steve being in this position, when he feels so intimately the words Tony’s saying. He’s good at so much, but when it comes to talking to the people he cares about - he fails. Consistently, considerably.

“No? Guess that’s something. This whole, what,” his hands float in the air. “Endeavor was about, about you. Trying to do right about you. But in the end, it was about me. Trying to make me feel better. This whole thing has been a slow-moving wreck. Watch as the poor little rich boy tries desperately to give you what he can’t manage to give himself.”

“Give me what?”

Tony looks at him, dead on, eyes catching eyes, before Tony looks away, staring at the far wall in silence.

“Tony,” Steve starts carefully. “You’ve given me someone to talk to about all my problems. Let me return the favor.”

“I can’t handle you right now,” Tony says. He drops his head into his elbow.

“Why’s that?” He’s so bad at being tender, but he places a hand on Tony’s shoulder, and is relieved when it isn’t shaken off. “I’ll leave if you need me to. But I’d rather know.”

“I accepted it before, you know? Not happily, but I did.” His voice is muffled by talking into his shirt. “But now, with you, I want it again. And I can’t. Because I’m not smart enough. And I have this coming, I know I do, Steve.” He looks up, so genuinely upset that Steve’s almost taken aback. “I have it coming. But I don’t want it. And I can’t even talk to anyone about it, because it’s a secret.”

“What’s a secret?”

Tony groans. “This is why I shouldn’t get drunk.” He sits up, his feet landing on the ground. He puts his elbows on his knees, and buries his head in his hands. “You know, I was always told counseling is for the pathetic and sad, and therapy is just for those actually insane, and real men are made of iron and just grit their teeth and move on, because everyone hates themselves and there’s just better pretending - and that’s how I’ve handled it for forty years but you know, that’s not working out so well.”

“Therapy can be good,” Steve encourages. His hand is still on Tony’s shoulder, and he curls his fingers slightly, so he’s clutching at Tony’s shoulder.

“I’ve made such a mess of this,” Tony says into his hands. “The one thing I dedicated the last of my life to not messing up, and I’ve done fucked it up anyway. Typical.”

“Made a mess of what?” Tony doesn’t answer. “Look, Tony, I want to help, but I’m not following anything you’re saying.”

“Good.”

“That’s not good,” Steve snaps, then regrets it as Tony’s head droops even further. “Look,” he starts again. “You don’t _have_ to talk to me. But I don’t get why you won’t even try. Is there something else I should be doing?”

“God, see? This is what I’m talking about!” Tony lowers his hand and waves them desperately at Steve. “You think it’s your fault. Everything is my fault and everyone around me are the ones who feel bad about it. And this shouldn’t even be _happening,_ I accepted the reality of the situation months ago, it’s just I got something I actually want to keep and suddenly, I’m what, ten years old again, crying because I realized I’d never have parents who will take those stupid Christmas card photographs?”

Steve doesn’t want to interrupt and say he’s not following _again,_ even though it’s absolutely true.

“I don’t even know why I am keeping it a secret! JARVIS, remind me.”

“I believe, sir,” JARVIS says, and Steve unthinkingly looks to the ceiling. “That you said you wanted to minimize risk. The public could take advantage of—”

“Not the public, don’t be dense, J, it doesn’t suit you. Why I didn’t tell Pepper in the first place. Or Rhodey.”

“I believe the phrase ‘minimizing collateral damage’ was used.”

“Yes,” Tony snaps. “That’s it. That’s why the, the not pursuing Pepper, though she may have let me, and the, and the—”

He falls back into the couch.

“Self-reliance is fine when you’re alone, you know that, Steve? As long as you’re isolated, you don’t know what you’re missing. But once someone is around, boom,” he mimes a boom with his hands. “Suddenly you just want to tell everybody everything. Even though it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.” He turns his head, staring at Steve straight on, and Steve feels utterly helpless.

“JARVIS,” Tony says, suddenly. “Sign me up for some therapy. This shit has got to stop.”

And with that, he stands, slightly wobbly, and heads out.

Steve doesn’t know what to do.

So he does nothing.  

He stays kneeling until his knees ache, and then stays a little longer.

* * *

The next three weeks are – odd.

Steve pays extra attention to Tony, who is apparently doing his best to appear as normal as possible. He has what Steve assumes are therapy appointments now, for an hour after Steve’s back from his book club, but other than that, he’s purposefully, pointedly normal.

But one night when they’ve finished the movie (The Godfather, which Steve grew bored of in the first twenty minutes), Tony pats Roomba on the head, then stands to go to bed, and promptly falls over.

He catches himself quickly, makes a quip about his leg being asleep, then quickly exits.

And so Steve looks closer.

It’s not that he _didn’t_ pay attention to Tony before, but there’s something different about constant observation and _concentrated_ observation. The act of being purposeful about it seems to open up an entire other side to Tony – the physical side.

Steve already knows Tony’s personality about as well as he could, but he never really noticed anything about his appearance before. He’s a guy, brown hair, brown eyes. Kind of short. On and off with the glasses. Once, when passing him the remote, Steve noticed a lot of callouses on his fingers.

But now that he’s concentrating on his physicality, it’s – well, there’s a lot to notice.

Tony has always been energetic, but it translates into a fluidity that’s almost graceful. He walks fast, gestures faster, dances around objects in the workshops, juggles instruments from hand to hand, backs up without looking, creates holograms in midair with a complicated twist of his hands.

His hands are free from the mysterious black checkerboard problem, but his neck occasionally shows signs. This mostly means that Steve spends an inordinate amount of time staring at Tony’s neck – but he often finds his gaze wandering, traveling down the shape of Tony’s shoulders, following around his chest, noting the build of his muscles, then moving back up to his brown, soft looking hair. And so Steve continues cataloging, spending time noticing the differences between Tony’s smiles, his gaits, his way of walking, his way of gesturing, his expressions.

And so Steve keeps wandering down this path, completely oblivious to where it leads, letting himself pay attention to everything about Tony, fitting in the physical details with what he already knew about Tony’s personality, finally having an image in his head of a full, complete person. And he doesn’t question his motives, doesn’t question the effects, not even once.

That is until he wakes up one morning, sheets damp with sweat, still breathing heavily, and head full of images of the long, long dream of he and Tony together, _together,_ in bed. And not just carnal desire, no, not a release driven by some kind of pent up frustration.

No, because that would be easier.

No, instead, it’s a dream about how one night when Tony was sitting on the couch, watching some stupid TV show, Steve had saw him on the couch and hadn’t been able to contain himself, had felt the overwhelming affection overflow, and had slid up behind Tony, snaking his arms around Tony’s shoulders, and let himself kiss the top of Tony’s head, hard and long. Tony had turned. He was impossibly close, big brown eyes large and slightly confused, before his face had transformed with a smile, and he leaned forward, capturing Steve’s lips – and it escalated, kiss pushing and pulling, faster and slower, and they had transported to the bedroom with it being a dream, and they had slid together, muttering words about _forever,_ and –

“Oh, come on,” Steve mutters, dropping his head into his hands.  

* * *

He’s not proud of it, but the next time he sees Tony, he grimaces at him, makes some excuse about needing to go on a jog before it gets too hot, and leaves the tower at a pace just under a dash.

It’s not that he’s so much _surprised,_ he's just incredibly _not happy_ about this turn of events.

It’s always been hard for him to fall for people – romantically or sexually. It takes a lot for him to get to the point that he can think of anyone that way. At absolutely most lenient, it’s happened three other times in his life.  

So he definitely wasn’t expecting it. But Tony, at least on paper, is his Type. So much so that he’s absolutely positive if he had any friends left, they’d tease him about it relentlessly. Brown haired, strong willed, stubborn, sassy, intelligent, and pushy. Tony even kicks ass in a fight, which Steve isn’t sure why is a box of his to tick, but definitely seems to be a running thread. Not to mention, every time this kind of thing has happened in the past, it’s been with someone he’s been friends with first.

So yeah, not _surprised._

But it’s just so _inconvenient._

Tony is not an option, in that regard. Steve could write essays about it, ranging from the cliched “Can’t risk my only friendship” and “He’s out of my league” and “Who knows if he likes guys anyway,” to the far more practical “Neither of us are emotionally capable of holding a relationship right now” and “Wooing someone is not a skill I was taught in the military.”

And so, one afternoon a few days later, he watches as Tony yells about reprogramming Butterfingers, feels a torrent of feelings just crash through him, and resolves that he will do nothing until it becomes unbearable.

Because right now, it’s bearable.

It's almost nice to love someone, even if it's private, even if it's unsharable. 

* * *

He doesn’t realize the first day he doesn’t think about it.

It being the big, grand, overwhelming “it” – the life he left behind, the newness of his current world, the people he abandoned, the people he couldn’t save.

Just, one day, he’s cooking eggs for breakfast, thinks, _Bucky always preferred brown eggs to white eggs,_ and he drops his spatula into the pan, realizing he hasn't thought of Bucky in days.

If he knew the actual day, he would’ve written the date down, maybe wrote it in red on his pin-up calendar, or set up one of those recurring date notices on his phone – just something, anything, to mark down in unalterable pen that _this_ is when it happened, when he _didn’t_ think or feel for once. If he had told Tony, he would probably have gotten some kind of comment about getting used to the future, but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t accepting the present, it was more finally letting the past fade to memory. He had held onto those feelings, those memories, that life, with white-clenched fists, unready or unwilling to let the past fade. But sometime, without his consent or knowledge, he had started to loosen his grip. And now – it’s not that he’s feeling an overwhelming sense of home. He’s just feeling a lack of the constant, dampening awareness of the difference between what was and is. It’s just gradually disappeared, like how winter fades into spring.

“Hey, you broke the egg yolk,” Tony says from behind him, and Steve flinches, whirling around.

Tony looks surprised at Steve’s jumpiness.

“Sorry,” Steve said, unsure of what he was apologizing for. “Sorry. I just—”

“Dropped the spatula?” Tony finishes, though that’s not what Steve was trying to explain. Tony picks it up out of the pan. “It’s fine, we’ll just make them scrambled.”

Steve watches in silence as Tony poorly tries to turn mostly cooked sunny-side-up eggs into something edible. His mind is flashing through images of his past life – Peggy, his mother, Bucky, the train, his outfit, old training facilities, the grocery store he used to go to, repairing socks by the stove in winter – like his brain is trying to make up for the days he spent moving on. His first instinct is relief – relief that maybe he actually will be okay. It’s followed by a close friend of Steve’s – guilt.

“You okay?” Tony asks casually, snapping Steve out his reverie. Tony’s staring at the eggs. They’re basically mush.

“I don’t know,” Steve says in a moment of uncalculated honesty.

“Wanna talk about it?” Tony says, still looking at the eggs.

Tony’s approach to emotional conversations – pretending they’re not happening – isn’t Steve’s favorite, so, with a hand, he turns off the stove, and gently turns Tony towards him.

Tony looks worried, and something in Steve’s throat wants to close up, his stomach starting to spin, and this is _not_ the time for that, so he decides to ignore it through blunt honesty.

“I’m worried I’m forgetting Bucky.”

“Barnes?” Tony asks, which Steve confirms with a nod. “Why would you say that?”

“It’s been days since I thought about him. Weeks since I felt guilty over his death. I think I am moving past him, which feels…” Steve shakes his head. “Wrong. Like an insult to his memory.”

“From what you told me, I’m sure that’s exactly what he would have thought. He would _hate_ you not pining over his memory or wasting your days in guilt over choices _he_ made and a very, very unfortunate bit of train engineering.”

Steve ignores the sarcasm. “I watched him die, a foot in front of me. You, or even him, can’t ask me not to carry that with me.”

“You can’t save everyone, Steve,” Tony says softly.

Steve looks up at the ceiling, and lets out a shaking breath. He’s no longer hungry, and he feels the urge to cry, just like he did in that bar back with Peggy; real, long, heavy tears, just for the memory of someone who no one is alive anymore to remember, who no one knows or cares about how much he truly was, how much of the revered and idolized Captain America was made from parts that Bucky influenced, that Bucky put and held together.

“No,” Steve agrees, tired. “But I could have saved _him._ ”

* * *

“What is all this?” Steve asks warily.

“Omelets,” Tony answers.

“Are you sure?” Steve asks doubtfully.

“Absolutely,” Tony answers, too cheerful to be honest.

Steve sits down at the kitchen table, still wary, and still sweaty from his run.

The table has _a lot_ of plates on it, all full of eggs in differing stages of being cooked.

“I wanted to make you one, but didn’t know for sure what you like, nor for sure how to cook one. So I tried.”

Steve nods, trying not to look ungrateful. Tony gets like this sometimes, like he has to occasionally give you something to convince you to stay. It’s unnecessary and it makes Steve kind of sad, but fighting about it is historically an exercise in futility, so he just picks up a mug of coffee and takes a sip.

He spits it back into the cup. “This tastes like motor oil.”

“DUM-E usually makes it to my tastes, so it may be a bit strong—”

“No,” Steve interrupts. “It tastes like literal motor oil.”

Tony frowns and steps away from the stove, picks up the mug, and takes a sip. To Steve’s horror, he swallows.

“Huh,” Tony says, looking down at the mug thoughtfully. “He might have gotten the water and oil mixed up. Well, no matter.”

Steve’s about to pick a fight about that _no matter_ part when Tony plops down next to him.

“Okay, so, you probably want to know what this about.”

“It’s about something?” Steve asks.

That’s probably a bad sign.

“Yeah. I had a really long talk with my therapist last week – did you know if you’re willing to pay off their student loans, they’ll give you seven hour sessions? Everyone should be rich; it’s so helpful. Anyway, she thought that I may be being unfair to you. Or, she led me to the conclusion I was being unfair to you, whatever, same difference. Or I am not being unfair to you now, but I will be in the future if I don’t give you time to prepare.”

As happens so often with Tony, he feels like the conversation is a rope being pulled out of his grasp, and he can only occasionally grab it back and stop it, yank back into the land of making sense.

“Prepare?” Steve grasps onto. “Prepare for what?”

“For me being gone,” Tony says, and something in Steve freezes, clenches, and then speeds up. If it were a movie, an anxious soundtrack would have started, full of strings and low notes.

“What?”

“I told you from the start, I’m not someone to get close to. I’m going away.” Steve hadn’t _forgotten,_ he had just _ignored._ “And it’s probably coming up soon. And you need a forewarning so you can – I don’t know, emotionally prepare. You’ve already lost a lot of people.” Tony frowns down at his lap, probably avoiding Steve’s gaze, and Steve still feels like he has missed the final step on the stairs, that lurching feeling of falling, but he hasn’t hit the ground.

“Where are you going?” Steve finds it himself to ask. “And why can’t I follow?”

“Oh, I guess I wasn’t being clear,” Tony says, and pulls on an extremely fake smile that he’s probably trying to pass off as casual. “My ol’ ticker is gonna go. Or, I guess, my ol’ ticker is poisoning my blood with palladium and _that’s_ gonna stop my heart. Wow, it sounds much more cannibalistic when I put it that way.”

“You’re _dying?_ ” Steve demands, once he is able to process what exactly Tony is driving at.

“Yep!” Tony says, all false cheer. He stands, and, stupefied, Steve watches as Tony clasps his hands together, rubbing them, and says, “I am estimating maybe about another month. I’m leaving you the Tower, so housing shouldn’t be an issue, if you were worried about that.”

It takes Steve a second to find his voice.

“How could you even begin to think _that_ would be something that would come to my mind after you tell me that?”

“Gotta look to the future,” Tony says, sardonic. “Like me. Anyway, now you know, so now I am going to make a tactical retreat and find Pepper and ask her for some meeting to attend. Pip pip, cheerio.”

Tony slaps him on the back, obviously making to leave, but Steve grabs his wrist and holds him in place.

The false-cheer expression Tony’s been holding finally slips, and Steve sees the tired, defeated face finally show itself.

“What, Steve?”

“We will fix it.”

“This is in no way a ‘we’ situation,” Tony says with a half laugh. “If it could be fixed, I would have found it.”

“Palladium, you said?” Steve says. He’s aware his voice is wavering, slightly, through his determination. “Someone must know. Chemists, biologists. There’s artificial hearts now. There has to be a solution. SHIELD. SHIELD has an entire—”

“Steve,” Tony interrupts, resigned and resolute. “Stop. I’ve done everything. It’s the end. I’ve already went through all these stages and am finally passed the finish line of acceptance.” Steve’s mind flits to all the times he’s found Tony passed out drunk. That one time on the couch. The conversation about wanting to change facts. “It’s over. Don’t beat yourself up over what can’t be changed.”

“Tony—”

“You deserved to know, so I told you. Don’t make me regret it,” Tony warns. He pulls his arm free, and leaves Steve standing there, one hand holding the back of the chair, the other still raised in midair.

He doesn’t realize how hard he’s grasping the chair until it turns to sawdust in his fist.

Tony’s voice rings in Steve’s head.

_You can’t save everyone._

_No,_ Steve had replied. _But I could have saved him._

He won’t let this happen. Not to the person who built him. Not again.

Steve pulls out his phone and navigates to his contacts, pressing one.

“Coulson,” Steve says, after the click saying it was answered. “Can we talk?”

 


	5. Chapter 5

In retrospect, he probably shouldn’t have told Pepper via text.

She’s a fast typer, apparently, even given her long nails, and when he ignores her calls, she spams his phone worse than the fake IRS wanting financial compensation.

He thought it would be easier to bite the bullet and tell everyone he cared about – wow, a crowd composed of three whole people – in one punch.

It didn’t turn out exactly as he hoped.

Steve’s was the most uncomfortable, the most painful. It’s not like he wanted Steve to shrug it off, to not care, but to watch the horror, disappointment, and confusion fill his eyes was far worse than Tony imagined. Tony had left the room twitchy and upset, and, not wanting to face that reaction again, had called Rhodey.

That was a minor disaster as well, but more minor than before – in Tony’s all-time rankings, it probably only ranked like, fifteenth.

Tony had cut off the conversation after seven minutes of explanations and placations, culminating in a wonderfully uncomfortably lie that Tony was sure he’d come up with a cure and that Rhodey definitely had nothing to worry about, long term, calm down, buddy, no need to come over. 

In-person was fucking horrific, over the phone almost made him vomit, so Pepper got the text, she unfortunately landing low on the totem pole of sliding responsibility, which of course meant that Tony was woken up by Pepper throwing a high-heel at him and yelling at a really, really high pitch.

After almost forty minutes, a hug, and several lies, he was finally ushering her out the door. He held it wide, a fake smile that was threatening to fall every second, when she reached over and pulled him into a hug.

“Don’t you _ever_ do that to me again, Tony, my heart cannot take it.”

“Of course, Pep,” he lies soothingly, patting her on the back.

She pulls back and sniffles, and runs a hand over her eyes. “Where’s Steve?” she asks. “I want to yell at him to take care of you better.”

“It’s not like he can do anything,” Tony objects, before blinking. He looks down at his watch – 11AM. He absolutely should have seen Steve by now today. He looks around the living room – and nope, absolutely vacant of 6 foot tall, blonde supermodels. “JARVIS?”

“Steve Rogers exited the building this morning at 6AM and has yet to return,” he answers.

“Oh,” Pepper says, with far less uneasiness than Tony’s currently feeling. “Well, when he comes back, then.”

“Sure,” Tony says, mind now racing. Has Steve ever left the building without telling Tony before? Where would he go? Did he leave for good?

“You take better care of yourself, do you hear me, Tony?” Pepper says.

He’s staring at the back wall. Was Steve just that angry?

“Tony.”

He doesn’t even know how to drive.

“Tony!”

There’s a hit on his arm, and Pepper’s staring at him like she might actually take a bat to his head this time.

“What? What?”

“You’re going to tell me the moment you make the cure, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, of course, Pepper. Have I ever given you reason to doubt me before?”

She looks at him with an expression of such disbelief that makes his inside squirm with such guilt that he just says, “Okay, sorry Pepper, of course,” and then closes the door on her.

He’s going to leave her every single one of his villas. And then he’s going to sell some more of his shit, buy more villas, and leave her more of them.

* * *

Steve comes back at 5PM.

By this time, Tony has completely taken apart the engine of his Ferrari. He’s currently about a quarter of the way through designing it to run completely on water – just for the fuck all of it – when JARVIS announces Steve’s return.

“Bring him down here, now,” Tony says.

He’s worried and upset and even a bit angry, and he isn’t sure which one is the dominant emotion quite yet, so he breathes through them and focuses on being nonchalant, sardonic, and, most of all, uncaring.

Which all sort of falls apart when Steve opens the door.

“Where were you today?” Tony demands immediately. God damn it. He sounds like a wife who thinks her husband is cheating with his busty secretary. “And why didn’t you tell me?”

“Forgiveness, not permission,” Steve says, and the words and his tone make Tony pause.

Steve’s a _nice_ guy, okay. He apologies to Roomba when he pets her too hard, he goes out of his way to be polite to strangers, he calls people sir and ma’am on the phone, he offered to pay for a dish he broke, he is respectful, he has manners, he’s kind.

He’s _nice,_ okay?

He has his stubborn setting, and his convictions, and yes, he once threw a remote at the TV when Ted Cruz was speaking at some event, and yes, Tony once made a really, really dumb joke about outsourced labor that he didn’t even mean that had him sitting through a two-hour long tirade about supporting immigrants – but Steve is _not_ someone Tony would ever worry about meeting in a dark alley.

There’s been a few times that Tony’s looked at him, at those blue eyes and that kind face and watched him stammer through a conversation and wondered, _Captain America? Nazi killer? Really?_

He asked Steve about it once, and Steve just kind of smiled, said, “You haven’t seen my angry setting.”

Tony, at the time, had thought _oh really? What was that whole spending two weeks hiding in my gym, then?_

Later, after Vanko and Hammer, Tony had thought, _o_ _h, I get it._

And now, looking into the set of Steve’s eyes, Tony thinks, _Oh. This is what it is like to be on the other side._

“Steve—”

“I’m curious, actually, Tony. Did you think that you would tell me that and I would – I don’t know. Just say, ah, okay. That’s a shame. And then just – what, let it go? Wait for you to die?”

“You’re making regret telling you,” Tony says. “Please drop it.”

They’re facing each other – maybe five feet apart – mirroring each other with stances of feet apart and arms crossed, and it feels kind of like the stand-off before an old-west gun shootout.

“I can’t _drop_ it, Tony. I can’t unknow it; I can’t unbite the apple.”

“I am not asking you to unknow it. I am asking you to let it go. Stop worrying about. It’s fine, everything is fine.”

“It is _no way—”_

“It’s just the period on the end of a sentence that’s already been written.” Tony wonders how his life got to this point – arguing with someone that his life isn’t worth the energy to try to save. He reckons if he told his twenty-year-old self that, he would have snorted, said, _sounds about right,_ and went right on. Fucking pitiful, is what it is.

“This is getting old,” Steve says.

“Look who’s talking,” Tony replies.

Steve’s nostrils flare, and Tony finds himself rubbing his eyes. “Look – we can and will probably argue about this till the end of my days. So, whatever. Let’s table it and start it again after Jeopardy. You ever going to tell me where you went today?”

Tony turns, getting ready to pack up some of his tools for the engine, when Steve’s voice make him pause.

“SHIELD headquarters.”

Tony turns. He stares at Steve, at the defiant look in his eyes, his posture screaming _just fight me,_ and the words, ‘doing what’ are stolen from Tony’s mouth.

Because he knows.

“You told them?”

“Yes, I told them,” no remorse in his tone, and Tony has had enough of it to know the feeling of betrayal when he feels it. “They’re one of the highest government research organizations in the world, they might have information—”

“That was _classified._ ” One wrong person overhearing, and it’s in the press. All Tony’s work to die in peace, all his work to not have people clamoring to try to get in his will – all gone. Poof. “And it was _not your news to tell._ Have you maybe not noticed that I’ve been trying to keep this whole ‘slowly dying’ thing a little bit on the DL? Do you just get kicks out of betraying people’s trust or—”

“I’m not going to apologize for trying to save you, Tony,” Steve interrupts, too sure, too firm.

“You’re all buddy/buddy with SHEILD now, huh? What did you have to trade away to get this? The Iron Man plans? Specs for your shield? The press conference releasing your existence?”

“My time. I’m officially a SHIELD agent.”

Oh, fantastic, the exact thing he had said about fifteen times that he wasn’t sure he wanted to be. Great, Tony’s doing a wonderful job at helping a national icon live his life. “What happened to ‘no longer a government or military lackey?”

“You. What is my time to your life?”

Tony barks out a laugh. “Your time is what I’ve been dedicated the last of my life to, Steve. Throwing it away sort of invalidates my last months, doesn’t it?”

“It doesn’t have to be your last months!” Steve’s voice raises for the first time. Tony’s never seen him with this type of anger. Not wanting a beat down, but just - angry. Just angry. His words get clearer, more pointed.

“I have exhausted my intelligence on this. No one at that acronym is smarter than me.”

“Maybe not as a whole, but you can’t act like you know more than everyone at everything. You haven’t exhausted their intelligence. Man up and take the help.”

“You really think they have more motivation to save my life than  _I_ do?”

“At this point, I am fairly certain _I_ have more motivation to save your life than you do.”

“You’re not going to let me die in peace, are you?”

“I’m not going to let you die.”

“You’re a selfish asshole,” Tony says. He shakes his head in feigned disappointment, with his real emotion of wanting to break down in tears of frustration and helplessness being pushed down down down deep. “You’ve taken away the dignity of _my_ choice for _my_ death because it makes _you_ unhappy.”

“I’m the selfish asshole?” Steve says. He’s not shouting anymore, but the way his voice wavers is worse. “What about you? You can’t do that to people. Make you matter to them and then just take yourself away. It’s not fair.”

“Fair?” Tony repeats.

And like that, he’s over this whole argument.

With a shake of the head, he heads towards the elevator, leaving Steve alone in the middle of the room.

* * *

He locks Steve out of the workshop.

At first, he also locked Steve out of the common room, kitchen, and bathroom, just out of vindictive pettiness because he _knows_ Steve has no idea how to unlock them, but he actually ends up feeling slightly bad – thanks a lot, conscience – so he ends up just keeping it to strictly _Tony_ areas.

Tony’s pissed and hurt and betrayed and really, really goddamn bored.

What did he even _do_ with his time before Steve?

Vaguely, he remembers being a CEO had a lot of responsibilities. Answering emails, meetings, overseas trips, conference calls, things to make, people to see. That probably was more of it than his brain remembers to catalog. But he also remembers being twenty-one and staying up for thirty-nine hours straight trying to get DUM-E to pick up a can without crushing it immediately.

He flips through his projects idly, and not a single one can catch his attention, let alone be one that he would stay up over a day to do, even if it was an avoidance tactic.

He glances over to the Ferrari, considers finishing the water-based engine, and quickly dismisses the idea with a tired sigh.

In the end, he has JARVIS lead him to Roomba, who he scoops up and takes downstairs. He builds a quick learning-algorithm so DUM-E will play ‘catch the bird’ with her. It lasts a couple hours, far longer than Tony anticipated if he was being real, but in the end, he sits back down on the couch, bored once more.

She wanders over to the couch, and sits directly in front of him.

“Meow,” he says.

“Meow,” she replies.

“Yeah,” he says, patting her on the head. “Me too.”

* * *

On day four, he watches as Coulson comes up to Steve, who had been sitting on the couch and biting a pencil for a good forty-five minutes.

Which Tony would say was pathetic, except Tony had watched him do it, so he really doesn’t have a leg to stand on there.

The conversation isn’t overly long – just about ten minutes – and ends with Steve signing something.

Tony flips off the screen once he leaves.

* * *

The next day, Steve knocks on his bedroom door for thirteen straight minutes.

“JARVIS, come on, now.”

“What exactly would you like me to do, sir?” JARVIS says, a little sniffy. “Play ‘Fuck You’ loudly until he disappears?”

Tony considers it, but he really doubts that would actually stop Steve, and was far more likely just to annoy Tony.

“Doesn’t he get _tired?_ ” Tony asks wearily.

“My surveillance of his performance in the gym would point to no, sir.”

Tony opens the door and almost gets punched in the face by Steve’s knocking fist.

“Oh, sorry, Tony.”

“What do _want?”_ Tony asks, a hand still on the door. “It's—” he looks to his watch. “11:30 _in the morning._ ”

“Right,” Steve says, slowly. “Right. Well. I have something for you, curtesy of SHIELD.”

“Have what?” Tony says, careful to keep his tone annoyed and his curiosity completely veiled.

“Well—” Steve looks like he’s biting his tongue on something. “Look, do you trust me?”

After everything, even the past few days, Tony just curls his fingers around the doorframe, and says, “Yeah, Steve. I do.”

Steve nods, and then pulls out a needle and sticks it into Tony’s neck.

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ,” Tony bites out, his hand immediately going to his cradle neck. “What was that for?”

“It’ll help your symptoms,” Steve says. “Looks like someone at SHIELD is smarter than you think.”

Tony shuts the door in his face.

* * *

He’s still pissed, even if a lot of it is for form’s sake – and hey, Steve isn’t exactly seeking him out, either – but he’s really edging further into ‘lonely’ than ‘angry,’ so he finds himself walking into the kitchen during Steve’s regular lunchtime.

“Tony,” Steve says in surprise. He’s blinking very rapidly. “Hi. How’re you feeling? Did the shot help? Are you okay?”

Great, pity. Just what he came in here looking for. “Oh, feeling good. Birds flying high, I know how they feel. Sun in the sky, I know how they feel. All that jazz. Being on a walking path towards your cell in hell is the dandiest time.”

“Is everything a joke to you?” Steve asks. He sounds tired, he sounds exasperated, and Tony feels his frustration rack up another four points.

“Funny things are.”

Steve shakes his head. “Do you have an off switch?”

“Yep,” Tony says, and then raps his knuckles against the reactor.

“Tony—” And that tone is gearing towards an apology, which he has no interest in hearing, so Tony spins and leaves the room.

* * *

The next two days, they both spend entirely alone.

* * *

It’s 3AM, and Tony’s sitting alone at the kitchen table, a mug of cold coffee held in-between his hands.

He’s feeling awful. On the physical side of things, he’s low on energy. Everything feels like its blurring at the edges, going fuzzy, and he can’t seem to find any grounding. It’s like he’s starting to fade away.

On the emotional side, he’s so goddamn lonely that he spent two hours lying in bed, feeling his heart beat, and the black hole inside his head start to expand and quake. He gets up to find Roomba, who was sleeping on the couch, and he couldn't quite bring himself to wake her, so he had headed to the kitchen, hoping to wait her out. Cats are awake at night, right?

He spends ten minutes with his head in his hand, just feeling bad for himself, when a noise has him lifting his eyes.

Steve’s in the doorway, looking as unhappy as Tony feels right now.

“Hey, Spangles,” Tony greets. He can’t manage any levity in his tone.

Steve’s quiet for a moment, then, “Look. I’m still angry at you. And I know you’re still angry at me. But I can’t not have you in my life. And we’re wasting valuable time, time we might not get to make up. So – truce?”

“Truce? ’Till when?” Tony questions, aiming for sardonic and probably landing somewhere between exhausted and defeated. “Till I’m six-feet-under?”

“Until we don’t have to worry about it anymore,” Steve replies. Why does he always answer dick-ish questions so seriously? It makes Tony feel like an asshole. “In whatever form that comes.”

Tony sighs, closing his eyes and dropping his head onto his arms. His hands tighten on the mug. 

“Okay,” he agrees, voice muffled by his arms. The situation probably calls for some type of sarcastic comment, like asking if it’s still a truce if he’s a ghost from beyond the grave, but he just can’t summon the energy.

Steve pads over silently and takes the seat next to Tony. After a moment, Tony can feel Steve’s arm settle around his shoulders, quietly pulling him so he’s tucked underneath Steve’s shoulder.

His heart aches.

Several self-deprecating thoughts flash throughout his mind – this is only comfort, Steve never got physically affectionate before he thought Tony was going to die, this is for Tony at the cost of Steve’s discomfort, Tony must have looked horrible to make Steve think this was a proper response – but, after a moment, he pushes them away, takes a breath, and just stops thinking.

Just for a moment.

* * *

Getting back to a routine is awkward, and the third time Steve cuts himself off when trying to make conversation, Tony just decides to hell with it and puts on Halo.

It’s easy to be together but to ignore each other when shooting shit on a television screen.

The game ends with them losing all their shit and being virtually demolished by the computer team, which figures for how their lives are going now.

A pop-up appears on the screen: EVERYTHING NOT SAVED WILL BE LOST.

“Good,” Tony snorts.

Tony looks over to Steve, going to make some comment about why super-soldier reflexes didn’t translate to video games, when he finds Steve already staring at him.

“What?” he asks, a little self conscious.

“Nothing,” Steve says. He looks down at the ground with a somber focus that, frankly, worries Tony.

“Steve?” Tony bumps his shoulder with his, and Steve looks up, slightly startled.

“What?”

“Wanna restart?”

Steve looks over to the TV. After a moment, he hits _exit._ Another screen appears: YOU HAVE NOT SAVED. YOU UNDERSTAND THAT THIS CANNOT BE UNDONE?

Steve stares at it, takes two quick, uneven breaths, hits _OK,_ and immediately turns the TV off.

“Did you know, in war, there was this whole culture of getting married fast?”

Tony blinks.

He can roll with the not-expected punches, Iron Man has proven that, so he settles back into the couch and resolves to follow Steve’s thought-bunny down the rabbit hole. Whatever it is, it’s clearly bothering him.

“Yeah. That whole thing about people going off to war so you marry them before you really know them, and then in the 1950s you end up with all these housewives who sort of want to commit manslaughter and these men who hide at work so they don’t have to face the emptiness of their hallow lives.”

A beat. “Sure,” Steve says. “Okay. Anyway, the thought process was that if you were going to die, you might as well experience those great things once. You know – love, marriage, kids.”

“Doing the hanky-panky, horizontal tango.”

“Right.” Another beat. “I didn’t really subscribe to that. Peggy and I – we took our time. And I died, just as they said I would, without having experienced any of that.”

“Okay.” Tony nods. Another long beat, and Tony wonders if Steve had asked him a question sometime that he was supposed to be answering. “What of it?”

“Well, what do you think? Should I have gone for it, experienced it with her? Died knowing? Or was I right to wait until I was sure death was off the table to try for a relationship?”

What?

“I don’t know,” Tony responds, incredulous. “I am perhaps the least qualified person in the world to answer that question.”

“Would you have gone for it?”

“I don’t know! My track record says no, but my track record should _never_ be used as an instructional manual. What do _you_ think?”

Steve looks at Tony with such a grave intensity that Tony kind of wants to hop over the couch and hide in the kitchen until this conversation is over with. The intensity ends after a moment, and Steve nods to himself.

“Okay. Want to restart the game?”

“No,” Tony responds, disbelieving. “I want to know why we just had a heart-to-heart about World War II war sex, actually.”

“Just looking before I leap,” Steve says, completely non-sensically, before flipping the TV back on.

Tony loves him – he really does, truly, in a way he’s actually gained up the courage to admit to himself – but dear fucking god if he _understands_ him.

* * *

Tony finds himself alone in his bedroom one afternoon, sifting through a pile of papers for concept designs for more green energy products.

It’s not a project he’s focused on a lot, especially lately, but he does want to leave SI with _something_ after his absence. He could run the city on reactor technology, but there’s other things to think about – phones, cars, appliances. And even more – third world countries and community outreach. He’d love to have a better charity guide left in his absence. He trusts Pepper to do it, but it’d be helpful if she had something clear to do.

There’s a knock at the door, and Tony calls “Enter” without really thinking about it. The door cracks open and in walks Steve. Tony glances up, just barely taking in how Steve seems somewhat tentative for some reason, holding himself oddly in the doorway, and as Tony glances back down at the papers in his hand, his mind catches up to his eyes, and Tony looks back up in surprise.

“Whoa, what do you get there?”

Steve’s awkwardly holding a bouquet of flowers, red and yellow dahlias, in front of his chest.

“Hi Tony,” he greets. “Gotta minute?”

“Sure,” Tony answers instantly. “Come on in.”

Steve makes his way to over to Tony’s side of the desk, and sits up on it, looking down at Tony.

He opens his mouth to speak, and Tony promptly interrupts him with a sneeze.

“God bless you,” Steve says automatically. His hand is twisting on the stems of the flowers, and Tony is insatiably curious.

“Sorry,” Tony apologizes, reaching for a tissue from the box on his desk. “I’m allergic to most orders of flowers.”

“Oh shit, really?” Steve says, eyes wide and blinking, and Tony shrugs.

“It’s not a big deal. I spend most of my time inside basements or conference rooms anyway. Or I did. There’s pros to not being outdoors-y. And most flower places deliver. Anyway, who are these for?”

Since Steve walked in, in his head Tony’s been systematically going down the list of every person Steve knows, crossing names off the list, and he’s come to the conclusion it’s someone he doesn’t know, someone sick at a hospital, or someone gave them to Steve and he doesn’t want to seem rude.

That or Steve’s been out making friends and hiding it from Tony, which, honestly, Tony would be legitimately offended. Not even jokingly, just honestly. And maybe even hurt, though he probably wouldn’t acknowledge that one.

“They were supposed to be for you,” Steve says, and Tony has been so far in his head thinking of people to add to the list that it takes him a moment to digest.

“Why me?” Tony asks, confused. “Was it to brighten up my room? I can get fake ones for that if this place is too dull.”

“No,” Steve mutters. “Just toss them. I don’t want to cause you any discomfort or anything.”

Tony doesn’t really want to toss them, because this is the first thing Steve’s ever bought him and at risk of sounding like a children’s book, he can feel his heart growing three sizes a bit, so he makes a mental note to have JARVIS recreate a plastic version of these guys as he picks up the flowers by the stems, and unceremoniously tosses them out the open window behind him. 

“Tony!” Steve yells, scandalized. “I meant toss them in the _trash,_ not out the window!”

“Why?” Tony asks, tipping towards befuddled. Steve gets up in arms about the strangest things. “The trash is in the room, they’d still make my eyes water from there. I might as well just put them in a vase, then.”

“I don’t want them to hurt anyone.”

“Steve.” Tony sends him a pointed look. “They’re flowers. They won’t hurt anyone.”

“You don’t know that,” Steve says. “Even a penny thrown out of a window could kill someone from high enough, and we’re on a really high floor.”

“Steve,” Tony says, perfectly even, he believes. “A penny couldn’t hurt someone at terminal velocity. Neither could a flower.”

“Yes, they could.”

“No, they couldn’t.”

“Yes, Tony, they could!”

“The one with the PhD in Physics is saying it couldn’t, Captain Math.”

“Well, he’s wrong.”

An hour, two whiteboards, seven equations, four google searches, and a spilled coffee later, they’ve determined that you cannot, in fact, die by being hit by a flower or a penny at terminal velocity unless you’re very unlucky, and Tony has officially forgotten what Steve came in here about in the first place.

“Anyway,” Tony says, wiping away the equations from the white board above his desk with his hand. “What did you want, anyway?”

“Right,” Steve says, shaking his head like he’s clearing it. He takes a deep breath, and nods to himself, then looks right at Tony – and Tony’s starting to get a bad feeling about this. “I came in here to give you the flowers and ask—ask.” He grits his teeth. “Ask—”

“Ask if I can help you with your stuttering problem?” Tony jokes, slightly amused.

Steve fixes him with an annoyed look, then blurts, “Ask if you would kiss me, actually.”

They both reel back in surprise at that – neither one of them can believe he said that, it seems.

“Come again?” Tony says, or croaks, really, because there’s no way that wasn’t a joke.

But Steve doesn’t look like he was cracking a joke. His brow is furrowed and he looks uncomfortable, but he steels his expression and nods, oh so serious, and says, “You heard me, Tony.”

Tony’s response is succinct and heartfelt. “Why?”

Steve blinks a few times, then looks around, like the answer to that is on the walls instead of inside his confused big ol’ head.

“Because…I want to?”

Well – JARVIS did inform Tony that Steve had read all of the information Tony sent about LGBT+ rights. Not only that, Steve actually asked Tony for a list of movies with LGBT representation so he could get used to it being public, whatever that meant. They had passed a kissing male couple the other week, too, and Steve hadn’t done anything but smile slightly to himself.

So maybe Steve was curious. Tony couldn’t blame him – men were hot, Lord knows Tony knows so, and now that it’s allowed, maybe he wants to give it a try. One more thing in the Brave New World to give a whirl.

And if he’s using Tony to experiment, well, that’s just Tony’s good luck.

Tony doesn’t have enough time left for it to hurt for a long time, anyway.

“Sure,” Tony shrugs, and Steve looks taken aback.

Like Tony would say no – even if Steve wasn’t handsome, even if Tony didn’t like kissing, even if Tony didn’t like men, even if Steve wasn’t impossible to say no to, even if Tony wouldn’t do just about anything Steve asked, even if there weren’t a billion piles of feelings pushing Tony to say yes – they’re friends. Tony would do it anyway.

“Sure?” Steve repeats dubiously. “Are you—”

“Come here,” Tony cuts him off. He reaches out and grabs Steve’s shirt, pulling him in, chest to chest. Tony’s always known he’s five-foot-too-goddamn-short, but this is honestly ridiculous. He’s going to have to be on his tip-toes.

Steve seems surprised into silence, and Tony leans forward.

The metaphorical clock ticks, and nothing happens.

“Gonna close the distance, Mister America?” Tony asks. He hopes Steve can’t tell how hard his heart is beating in his chest.

One positive of the reactor, it seems.

“I—I don’t know how to do this.”

“Do you want me to take the lead? I can assure you I know how to. I can call up like, a third of the popular supermodels in the 1990s to attest to it.”

Steve swallows, blinks several times, and turns his wide, somehow worried eyes on Tony. “Tony, are you sure? This—”

Tony doesn’t know what he’s going to say – dear Lord, he hopes it’s not something vaguely homophobic – but he does know he doesn’t want to hear anything that’s going to make this not happen, so he just leans forward, and goes for it.

Tony has a theory about things that mean a lot to him – pretend it doesn’t matter to you. That way, there isn’t the pressure for it to go right. The person doesn’t know they have the power to hit you where it hurts, and you can play off anything that happens.

He should probably tell his therapist that. It makes sense to him, but so did telling Pepper that he forgot his social security number because it meant she would have to memorize it and thus pay more attention to him, and his therapist really didn’t care for that one.

Steve’s hesitant for about three seconds, but then seems to deflate, and pulls Tony in against his chest, and Tony reaches his arms around Steve’s neck, being careful not to place his trembling hands on Steve’s neck.

Kissing someone and meaning it is as foreign to Tony as it is to Steve, and it shows in how neither seem to know how far to take it.

Tony, because he’s a selfish bastard and knows this fantasy will probably get him through to the end of his life, pushes up with the balls of his feet, and opens his mouth.

Steve gets with the program quickly, opening up to him and letting Tony take the lead, which he does, pressing in and harder for a good three seconds, and hating himself for it, before putting a lasso on himself and pulling back, releasing Steve’s lips.

He places his forehead on Steve’s and closes his eyes.

They both breathe – one, two, three breaths – and then Tony steps back.

He puts on a grin he hopes passes for cocky, pushes all the emotion down down down into a steel box, padlocks it, swallows the key, and says, “Not bad. A lot of tongue. Bleh, saliva.”

He wipes his mouth, because there actually was a fair bit of saliva and even with great kissing it’s weird if you spend any energy at all to think about it.

Steve opens his eyes, looking spaced out and confused all it once.

“What?” Steve says, then shakes his head. “Wait, what?”

“Talk about crossing an impossible one off the bucket list,” Tony quips, and hopes Steve takes it to mean kissing a national icon.

“Wait, what?” Steve repeats, his eyes wide. “Did you—Saliva? It was bad?”

“No,” Tony immediately denies. “Though shouldn’t _I_ be the one asking _you_ that? You’re the one experimenting with men.”

“Experimenting with—I’m doing _what?_ ”

Either Steve hit his head hard this morning in practice – which actually might explain a couple things, actually – or they’re having two separate conversations.

“Didn’t you want to try kissing me?” Tony asks. He’s backed up to his desk and finds himself leaning on it, hoping it makes him look calm and collected, instead of needing support, which is the actual truth.

“Yes,” Steve says. “ _You._ Not men.”

“I am a men, Steve,” Tony says. He can feel his face contort – way to be eloquent, Stark. “I mean, you do know that, right?”

“I wasn’t asking you to kiss me to kiss men, Tony,” Steve says slowly. “I was asking you to kiss me for – I meant it as a first of many.”

“With me?” Tony asks, bewildered.

“With you,” Steve says, throwing his hands in the air. “With you, like what it could have been with Peggy.”

“Wait, why? I don’t know what’s going on, what’s happening?”

“Oh my God,” Steve mutters, and runs a hand down his face, looking pained. “I am poorly asking you if you’re interested in dating me.”

“Oh my _God,”_ Tony says in horror. Steve reels back, obviously hurt by the tone, but Tony continues, “Did I Stockholm Syndrome you?”

“Did you _what?_ ” Steve asks. His arms are now awkwardly crossed in front of his chest, holding his elbows, but Tony is falling back into his own head, pictures of the past months flying through his head, just now with a new filter.

“I _swear_ that wasn’t my intent – Jesus Christ, no one is going to believe me. I didn’t house you so you’d—”

“I know,” Steve says. “I know, Tony.”

“Oh fuck. Look, Steve, if you knew any other person you wouldn’t like me—”

“I’ve know other people,” Steve interrupts. “You made me, remember? Book club? The VA? Pepper and I talk weekly on the phone!”

Tony did not know that. None of this makes sense. “But then why do you like me?”

“Do you want me to write a list?” Steve asks, sounding bewildered.

This day is not going how either of them expected, it seems.

“No, don’t do that, I do not want that. But you’re serious? You like me? Moi? _Me?_ ”

“Yes!” Steve says, his hands going up in exasperation. “Yes. Yes, that should be obvious at this point.”

Tony’s heart is beating like a fucking drum at a Cleveland Indians game. His left arm is actually shaking, and he can feel some of the shock starting to slide off.

“I never thought—I mean, never in my wildest dreams—or, okay, maybe in a third of my wildest dreams—”

“Tony, this has been five minutes of agonizing embarrassment. Do you like me or no?”

He didn’t realize he never actually gave Steve an answer on that.

“Of course I do, dipshit,” Tony snaps. He’ll feel bad about that later, he’s sure, he's just really fucking rattled. “You really think I spend _that_  much time with everyone doing random shit?”

Steve’s blinking at him in surprise or confusion, Tony’s not sure. After a moment, he just stutters out, “Oh, well, I mean – I have never seen you with anyone for a basis of comparison, I guess.”

“Well, hooty-hoo, I’m in love with you, this isn’t mortifying at all.”

Steve’s staring at him like he has the answers to the goddamn universe, his eyes slowly widening and a smile starting to build into a full-fledged grin. He reaches forward to take Tony’s hand, which Tony lets him – and some part of him, some base part, is going, _Oh. Oh, so this is what it feels like. This is what it feels like._

“Are we on the same page, then?”

Tony remembers looking over at Pepper on that balcony, all that time ago. She in her low-cut blue dress, holding a drink, staring outside and waiting – waiting for him, waiting on him, just like always. He remembers turning away, and that feeling in his chest – that feeling of letting go of hope, of possibility, of wants, because he had to. Because it was right.

Tony slides his hand out of Steve’s, and feels it again, bright and painful and loud.

He watches as Steve’s smiles slips, and hates himself as he says, “This is not a good idea.”

Steve’s head immediately ducks.

“You misunderstand, under normal circumstances, that’s a great idea, and I’d be all into that idea and exploring all of its – assets. But not now. You have to know better than that. I have an expiration date.”

“I don’t care,” Steve says, eyes steeling again, and reaching forward to retake his hand – and God, he’s stubborn, he’s so stubborn, this is going to be a hell conversation. “I am the world’s leading authority on waiting too long, and I don’t want to do that again. It may end, I know that, but it’s better to try. To have it for a while. And meanwhile, we’ll keep trying.”

“I’ll die before we get anywhere.”

Steve takes a step closer. They’re chest to chest. “You can sink or swim, right? I am not letting you give up.”

Tony hears his own words echoed back at him, and he wants to roll his eyes. “God, why didn’t you punch me for that? It’s so obnoxious.”

“Tony, please don’t say no.”

Tony steps back, but doesn’t let go of Steve’s hand. “It’ll be worse when I go. You realize that, right? On both of us. It’ll be harder on both of us.”

“You’re not going to go.”

“You can’t stubborn someone back to life.”

“You’re not going to _die._ ”

Tony smiles. He squeezes Steve’s hand once, then drops them. “How about this? You ask me in two months. Two months, on the day. And I’ll say yes. If I'm here to say yes, I'll say yes.”

Steve looks like he’s going to argue, but in the end, he drops Tony’s eyes, nods once, and steps back.

“Two months, on the day,” Steve repeats. “I won’t forget.”

When Tony made his own personal pledge to be a better person, he never, ever considered it would involve watching Steve walk away.

* * *

The next day, Tony hides in his workshop.

He’s not proud of it, and he knows Steve’s going to find him there, but it gives him the breakfast reprieve, and he spent pretty much all of his dreams regretting his oh-so-grown-up decision, so he’ll take the time he can get.

It’s about one PM when he hears the door open.

Tony looks up, trying to think of a crack to diffuse the awkwardness he just _knows_ is going to be there, and is surprised into dropping his mouse a few inches when he sees Coulson.

Steve isn’t too far behind, which takes Tony a second to notice.

“Agent,” he greets. “What can I do for you?”

“Fury was going to stop by, but as you’re not really causing trouble for once, he delegated the honor to me,” Coulson says.

“I heard you’re taking my houseguest from me,” Tony says, bending down to pick up the screwdriver, and avoiding their eyes.

“If you mean Steve signed on for a job, starting in two months, then yes, I guess you could qualify it as that.”

Tony’s eyes find Steve’s, unwittingly, and Steve’s staring back, unrepentant, and yes, that’s right – they never really talked about that.

“What do you want?”

“When we were looking for a solution for your – problem, we found some old files of Howards. Thought you might want to take a look.”

“Sure, whatever.” Coulson reaches out, and Tony takes a step back. “I don’t like to be handed things. Put them on the table.”

Coulson hands them off to Steve.

Coulson looks like he's making to leave, but hesitates. “Stark, I did want you to know, we are extending every resource into trying to solve this for you.”

“Dandy, I’m sure the tax payers would appreciate that.”

Steve puts a hand onto Coulson’s shoulder. “Phil, how about I walk you out?”

Steve returns two minutes later.

“Tony.”

Tony grunts. He’s staring at a line of code. It’s HTML and makes all the text on his website bright, neon yellow, but he’s sure it looks impressive to Steve.

“Tony. I’m not going to apologize for telling him.”

“And I’m not going to act like I find that fine,” Tony responds, still looking at his computer.

“I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t your life on the line.”

“What if it was the lives of a hundred orphans, huh? What then, Steve? That a good enough reason to spill my secrets?”

There’s a hand on his shoulder, and he’s being spun around.

“If the situation were reversed, what would you have done?”

“That’s not _fair,”_ Tony says. “I lose either way.”

“Exactly _. Exactly,”_ Steve says. “Because I lose you or I hurt you. And I don’t want either one – but one doesn’t have a permanent consequence. And I’m sorry, I’d rather have you alive than almost anything else. Alive and furious at me, me out of your life even, is better than you dead. There’s nothing worth it.”

Tony recognizes that there may be something else going on here, on his end. It may be less about Steve’s actions and slightly more about the previous betrayals of trust, about Obadiah, about loss of control in a situation where he's already so helpless.

Steve may not have been right, but he also may not have been wrong.

“I’ll manage to forgive you,” he decides as he's saying it, making Steve reel back in surprise. “Don’t think it won’t take some groveling, some decent pizza. Some letting me win at Mario Cart. Oh, or letting me win at wrestling. My ego could _take that,_ let me tell you.”

“Tony, we shouldn’t let this fester—”

“Steve,” Tony says, catching his eye. He breathes through it. “Let me let it go.”

It takes a moment, but Steve nods.

“I’ll get angry about it again next time we have a fight,” Tony quips, and Steve rolls his eyes. “Granted I’m alive for us to fight again.”

“Please don’t joke about that,” Steve says, sounding pained.

“Not really a joke. Plus, it’s a coping mechanism, get with the _therapy,_ Steve.”

“It’s not—”

“You’re crinkling those,” Tony says, nodding to where Steve’s still clutching Howard’s files, which Tony pulls out of his hands.

He starts to sift through it. There’s a DVD, which Tony immediately throws to the side – he really doesn’t need to hear Howard’s voice right now – as well as some notebooks and some plans.

“What’s this one?” Steve asks, pulling out something from the bottom of the pile.

“Old diorama from the ’74 expo, looks like.”

“What’s it about?”

“Huh? I don’t know.” Tony scans it quickly. Then, he scans it slower. Then, he drops the other files on the table, holding only the diorama. Then, he reads it again, first word to last.

“Tony?”

“It—” His heart is beating, oh god, his blood is pumping so quickly. “It looks to be some sort of – new element.”

Tony looks up at Steve, who’s staring back, clearly not understanding why this matters at all.

“New element? That’s impressive.”

“Steve,” Tony says. Steve’s still looking down at the diorama. “ _Steve._ ” Steve looks up.

“What?”

“Do you know why I’m dying?”

“Palladium poisoning,” Steve answers promptly.

“Right. From the element powering the reactor.”

“Oh, the element—” He pauses. “Are you saying…?”

Tony stares at him, hope coursing through his veins.

* * *

Setting up the particle accelerator is infinitely easier than Tony imagined because Steve has massive muscles. Not that Tony _couldn’t_ do it, of course, but sledgehammering, jackhammering, and moving shit is just a lot easier when you have superhuman strength, and even easier when you have a decent enough motivation.

Tony is also glad he’s a billionaire – he’s always glad he’s a billionaire, mind you, but he’s a lot more glad when it means he can get million dollar pieces of scientific equipment sent to his house in under six hours rather than the normal month.

It’s been hours, several hours, and Tony’s at a more delicate part of the wiring process when Steve says, “You seem better.”

“I like a project to focus on,” Tony says, hands never stilling. “Always better with something to do.”

“Your version of needing the war,” Steve muses quietly.

“What was that?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“Hey, while I’m doing this, would you be a dear and get your shield?”

Steve blinks.

“My shield? Whatever for?”

“If we put this,” he bangs on part of the accelerator. “On the shield, it would finally level out.”

Steve glares, and Tony grins.

* * *

Steve yells at him for putting a hole in the wall – but hey, particle accelerators aren’t _that_ easy to control, especially on as little sleep as he’s on – but when JARVIS congratulates Tony on being able to synthesize the element, Steve goes completely quiet. 

Tony goes to put it in the reactor – the moment of truth – when he feels a hand on his shoulder. He looks back over, and there’s Steve.

“If this doesn’t work,” Steve says. “I won’t give up.”

“If this doesn’t work,” Tony says. “We’re still naming this element after me. Stark-isium. Stark-rilium. Tony-gen. Badassium. I’ll be in every textbook in the world – my dream.”

Steve takes the babble for what it is – deflecting cold, hard fear – and squeezes his shoulder. Tony turns back around, takes a breath, and puts it in.

“Sir,” JARVIS says. “The reactor has accepted the modified core. I will begin running diagnostics.”

Tony lets out a breath, and falls back onto Steve, who is standing behind him. Steve catches him, and Tony finds himself in a strange, backwards hug.

“Hey Tony,” Steve says. Tony can feel him press a kiss onto the top of his head.

“What, Cap?”

“Do I still have to wait two months?”

Tony puts a hand on the table, waits a moment, then breaks out into an uncontrollable laughter that almost puts him on the ground.  

* * *

Two months to the day, Tony finds himself sitting on the couch, working on his tablet for some new R&D adventure, when he feels Steve tap Tony's foot that is currently sitting in his lap.

"What?"

"So, SHIELD has finally gotten around to giving me a bit of grief over our relationship."

"Just you wait until Entertainment Weekly sees you. You don't know grief, Rogers."

Steve just smiles and taps his foot again. "I know you want to ask."

"You know nothing."

Steve smiles and shakes his head, and something soft and affectionate and warm settles down to stay somewhere in the midst of his chest – 

And there it is.

He blinks, feeling somehow not fading when he realizes.

He’s content.

Completely, utterly content.

"It's mostly teasing, but I did want to let you know that on a professional level, they wanted my assessment of you."

Tony blinks, and pushes his mushy-relationship feelings to the side. He'll deal with them in a moment. "Assessment?"

"Apparently they've been wanting an agent to secretly tail you for ages. Write a report of you - what you're really like, personality traits, how you respond to stress, how you work with others. Other stuff."

"And they wanted you to do it—" 

"—Because we've lived together for ages, and I'm a SHIELD agent now."

"Oh. Well. Did you do it? I hope the words ‘devilishly handsome’ are in there somewhere. Preferably ink, though I’d accept permanent marker as well.”

Steve taps his foot again, which Tony takes as an invitation to kick into his stomach. “Are you even going to ask what the assessment is for?”

“I am assuming the boy band Nick Fury is putting together.”

“The Avengers Initiative,” Steve confirms. “Yes.”

“And?” Tony asks.

Steve just raises his eyebrows and hands over a folder, which Tony takes with as much disrespect as he can muster, because he still hasn’t talked to this therapist about that ‘pretending not to care’ thing, and opens it.

He skims it, eyes scanning for keywords, and there it is at the end –

IRON MAN: RECOMMENDED

TONY STARK: RECOMMENDED

“Thanks, boo,” Tony says, and flings the folder back at Steve, who catches it one-handed, the coordinated dick.

“Your nonchalance act doesn’t fool me,” Steve says with a smile, and damn him. “I know you’re happy about this.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony says, heart beating, and he can’t help smiling. It reminds him of the few really, really good times in the past with Jarvis, Rhodey, Pepper – how his smile comes on accident, unbridled, and he can’t put it away.

Steve smiles back, and reaches forward, grabbing Tony's hand and squeezing it.

Those mushy feelings burst into a swell, a landslide, and Tony squeezes back.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"I'm glad we made it here," Steve says. "Both of us."

Tony shrugs, the movement catching a little on the couch. "Me too." A smile. "Guess it was inevitable." 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed!
> 
> *five month later edit* I just realized my whole inspiration for this fic was the idea that he donated his entire art collection to Steve instead of the boy scouts, and then I completely and utterly forgot to put it in here. LOL. Nice, me. So just pretend that was somewhere in like, the third chapter!


End file.
